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?
By raising the prices for all their games, raising them again for physical copies, and allowing the use of game key cards, Nintendo decided the carrot or stick alone just wasn’t profitable enough, and thus chose both.
That… uh… what?
Do you not understand the “carrot and stick” metaphor?
You listed three times Nintendo used the “stick” then claimed they opted to use both, I assume in an attempt to sound clever.
Does everyone on this platform have long covid or something, because these replies are really worrying!
Anyway, yeah, Nintendo suck ass, well done.
The $60 → $70 price increase was just Nintendo being greedy, so the metaphorical “carrot” in this context is raising the price of physical copies to $80 to make the digital price seem like a good deal in comparison (diminishing physical sales further as an excuse to get rid of them entirely), while the “stick” is the game key cards that take any meaning away from owning physical media in the first place.
In any case, disagreement is no reason to insult the intelligence of other users.
Fair enough, sorry.
I had just finished reading the top voted response, which says Sony killing discs is about billionaires fucking children and may have misdirected my consternation toward you.
They’re alluding to the inherent entitlement to systematic abuse that is a feature not a bug of capitalism.
If you think lefties being crass and exasperated online is us being batshit lunatics maybe Lemmy isn’t for you. Most online communication and aggregation that most people use on a daily basis is hyper-corporate, so the alternative being full of the people who don’t feel welcome there or are censored there or feel cast off from there shouldn’t surprise you.
you’re replying to
TrickDacy@lemmy.world’s latest alt… It’s soo obvious when you look at his profileI think anyone who sees a post about the videogame market and immediately launches into a screed about billionaire pedophiles isn’t really helping whichever political viewpoint they purport to hold, and likely deserved having been “cast off.”
You can still resell the game key card, so it doesn’t kill the secondary market, though…
They will still become worthless once Nintendo shuts down the Switch 2 servers, making piracy the only viable form of game preservation at that point beyond whichever means Nintendo will have to get people to buy the games a second time on a new platform.
You’re right. It is still a bit better than full digital game.