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?
Yes, mental.
(it’s a mirror of humanity)
I’ve won so many arguments on this website it’s actually insane.
Congratulations, I think?!
It happened to PC games. Sure, Steam will do a big sale twice a year, but you hear about people with massive libraries of games that they’ve never played and can’t get rid of. In ye olden times, they’d be in the game shop used bin.
The high sees be looking better and better
When I was young we used rent games from the stores. Just sayin
Switch to pc. Walled gardens are inherently problematic.
While usually good advice, that is a pretty tone deaf thing to say to someone complaining specifically about the death of physical media.
This is about removing any and all ownership rights of buyers.
Not just of selling you copy second hand but also things like lending (even to your own family), gifting and even playing it in a different device
Mandatory Age Checks on the device also helps with stopying lending even to members of your family that live with you and use the same device to play the game: if the hardware (with the excuse of Age Checking) identifies the user, then the copy can be bound to a specific person in a specific devive rather than the device alone, so for example two siblings in the same household need to buy two copies to play it even at different times rather than just one copy as the “age check” identifies the user and only allows a specific user for a specific copy.
The fewer rights buyers de facto have, the more copies publishers sell as users can’t get the games by alternative legal means, and whilst at first there might be some backlash from taking those rights away, in my experience not only are most gamers sheeple or at best dogs that bark a lot but don’t bite, but usually they over time get used to not having those rights (especially as new, younger people, who grew up without having had them become gamers), so pretty much all backlash from taking those rights away eventually dissapears and those companies end up making more money than before.
In regards to your edit: lemmy is quickly becoming an echo chamber of extreme pov’s and hot takes. You take the Reddit refugees and the Reddit banned users but leave the major casual users behind you get a lot of opinionated reactionary people in a relatively small place. Combine that with independently ran and lightly moderated servers.
I’ve been here for a while and at risk of sounding typical and repetitive of users of other platforms, it’s becoming shitty.
We must get more casual users here to balance it out
I’ve seen the something similar on Mastodon. It’s become colonized by some of the worst of Twitter’s offal. A lot of them moved over to Bluesky, but I’ve seen a return since that platform’s shittiness finally emerged. Negative and fear-mongering news posts as well as entitled snark. It’s still better than the alternatives, but I’m starting to think that maybe the algorithms were only part of the overall problem… But at least I have the means to moderate what I see.
I honestly think every single platform that uses a vote score system is inherently susceptible to becoming an echo chamber.
The only value a vote score generates is consensus and IMO it’s not worth the cost.
Vote scores influence readers before they even engage the content. It lowers the bar of participation, partly by removing the necessity of commenting approval/disapproval, and secondarily by making approval/disapproval anonymous.
Ultimately it makes it easier for people to participate without actually contributing. It equates thoughtful with thoughtless engagement that lowers the quality of the end result.
I agree. I think hacker news does it well. No downvotes and upvotes are publicly hidden.
I could see vote score being a valuable moderation tool on the backend.
Most users on this platform are batshit mentally insane leftists, yes.
they want us to pay constantly, forever.
it will not stop unless its stopped.
Sorry but I must ban your PSN, XBox and Steam account because of this comment. It’s not my fault. People told me to do it. All your digital purchases are gone Sir.
Bold of you to say “people”.
Your account has been banned by an algorithm.
The algorithm will now take every attempt to communicate why you were banned as “suspicious activity” and ban you again.
Your IP has been logged, and all future accounts will be banned.
Please have your agentic AI log your proof of citizenship with the authorities for review and social re-education.
Sorry but I can’t confirm that you’re human. Place certified PlayStation controller in your mouth, grab your right ear with your left hand, wave into camera with your right hand. Press ready button when you’re ready.
Thank you for the insight. I had no clue about the news on my own
Rent Extraction is the objective, and I partly disagree that killing the secondary market is the blanket objective. Look at ticketmaster. They sell the tickets, then they also take fees on the resale of those same tickets purchased by customers/scalpers. They profit twice thanks to the secondary market. Doesn’t work (yet) for something like books, but give it time.
The general objective is to force everything to subscription and also force upgrades thanks to them controlling EOL for everything. They never want to give users the ability to run their own servers for sunsetted services.
Lemmy is pretty much composed of people who were banned on reddit.
They could have been banned for disagreeing with dickish mod… or for being asshole themselves.
Well, I belong to that club myself. Although for a stupid fucking reason.
Some of us quit when we couldn’t use RiF. Literally dozens of us
Make that dozens +1.
Same thing happened to the home video market. No more dvd sales and resales. Everything gets funneled into subscriptions.
This killed a lot of Indy films and films that had weak releases can no longer recoup any money via dvd sales. So more of those films simply don’t get made anymore
Weirdly, things are kinda of reversed in this situation.
To address things in backwards, digital platforms have been a massive boon to smaller studios due to not having to front the cost for manufacturing. It allows them to take creative risks and reach broader audiences.
As for the comparison to the DVD and Blu-Ray market, things sort of happened slowly and more “naturally” in that case. The market died because streaming offered a significant value to customers so they moved away of their own accord. It was a slow process and it took years before the downsides became apparent.
With games, the platform holders and publishers haven’t bothered to offer any additional value for going digital, quite the opposite really. So the physical market has endured, and the resale market with it. Instead of learning any lessons or competing on value, they’ve decided to force the issue and just kill off the format itself.
One was a death, the other is an execution.
Killing ownership is the objective, killing the secondary market is collateral
