As far as publishers are concerned, the single greatest cancer they face is the resale market. When a store sells a new game for £60, the publisher makes about £20, and the store gets between £15-20, depending on how they choose to price it. The rest is the cost of manufacturing and shipping. (These are rounded estimates, it varies)
Then, a week later, when someone trades that game in and the store resells it for $40, they get all of that, and the publisher gets nothing.
From their perspective, that’s basically theft, which is why they’ve been trying for decades to put a stop to it, which they can’t, or at least make more money from secondary sales by bundling single-use codes for “bonus” content that really should be part of the main game, which people who buy preowned will have to shell out extra for.
So that’s what getting rid of physical media is all about. If they get rid of the discs and cartridges, that market vanishes.
Please don’t mistake this explanation as an excuse. All of the platform holders have had the means to kill off the retail market and usher customers onto their digital storefronts for at least a decade. All they had to do was pass on even a fraction of the savings they make selling digitally, which cuts out the manufacturing, shipping, and retailer costs, onto the customer. But they haven’t. Games cost the same on the Playstation Store as they do on the Gamestop Shelf. Sometimes more!
They could have used the carrot, but pure greed means they’re now opting for the stick.
Edit, Supplemental Question: This is my first post on Lemmy, and the responses have me wanting to clarify something- Is everyone on this platform fucking mental?
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We’re not at any kind of crisis point.
Blu-ray discs are still perfectly usable. A quad-layer Blu-ray could still hold a modern AAA title like Call of Duty, and a good many indie titles. Maybe it won’t be able to hold GTAVI, but we’ve put games on two discs in pretty much every console generation.
After AAA games get too big for Blu-rays, there’s still flash memory. Nintendo has been using flash carts for two console gens with no problem; there’s no reason Sony and Microsoft couldn’t design their own flash cart slot. The nice thing about those, you probablynever have to change compatibility due to file size ever again; since flash memory is always getting smaller. And if you design the physical object correctly, you can leave room for a lot of extra chips.
But that’s not all. Nobody would be complaining about the end of hard copies if the publisher just gave you the files to do with as you please. No DRM, no “anti-cheat” crippleware, no day one updates that finish the actual game, no launcher.
Deliver that via online service, add some retro game preservation projects, and now you’re a Good Old beloved pillar of online game storefronts.
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I have shit that’s older than I am that plays without apparent problem.
Maybe the problem is your overactive imagination
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Aah. I didn’t know what you meant with “mental” until I found this comment you’re responding to. I get it now.
The first piece of advice I’d give to anyone new to Lemmy or Piefed is that the “block” functionality is essential. Don’t hesitate to block users, communities, and even whole instances. It significantly improves the experience.
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Not what was said, but sure let’s explore that anyway.
Why not have games that can be played forever? The only kind of people who’d see something wrong with that are corporations. You’re not a corporate shill, are you?
We also invented read-only pressed quarts memory that’ll hold information for 50,000 years. Sounds like a good place to starts, right?
So… Why would discs need to be replaced?
Alright, so let’s say we want to replace disks anyway. So… You forgot flash memory exists?
It’s kinda ironic when you say nobody has a solution or an imagination, but… Well… You clearly seem to missing the obvious solution to the problem you personally invented.
So then don’t replace them :)
Why do they need to be replaced?
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I am also upset they are ending disc production.
I don’t understand why they need to be phased out or ‘replaced’ as a medium other than greed.
You’ve said in other posts that physical media can often have a 30 year lifespan, but that’s more than Sony’s digital lifespans. You typically only get ~10-15 years for Sony’s digital services (upfront: I asked gemini about this) which is half the lifespan.
Why does optical need replacing with something else if that something is worse?
Downvote bcuz your annoying
Ok then what is it?
Lol sure that’s what it is.
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Interesting so you have no answer yourself, only bile and weird things to say, which don’t near making a shred of sense. Awesome talk. Enjoy the meth, I guess.