Killing ownership is the method, killing the secondary market is the objective.
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?
109 replies
Lemmy truly is a psychotic leftist's playground
This is so much bigger than the secondary resale market, which is a small added bonus for them
The move from physical media; the price of computer components rising beyond reasonable levels; the locking down of hardware; the locking down of software distribution methods; the inevitability of de-anonymizing all Internet users…
The capitalist class has had enough of your criticism. We discovered their little criminal playground that preyed on children, we discovered how they hide their wealth without contributing back to society, we even discovered how government programs meant to “keep us safe” are used to exploit everyone on earth.
You think Sony ending physical discs is about video games? Brother it’s about the mind prison they’re designing to keep you in line while they fuck preteens on yachts until this whole planet burns to the ground
Extrapolating a consumer usability problem into grandiose, vague fearmongering of the ultra-rich Epstein class isn’t helping anyone. It’s more likely to make people defeatist.
If you actually care about things like tax havens, or believe they have a relation to this issue, show people what they can do to fight them.
[email protected]
Alternativelly, multiple subgroups within the power elites can support some of the same things for different reasons.
It's perfectly logical that, for example, intrusive tracking under the excuse of Age Checks "to protect the children" is supported by the Pedophiles in the Elites because it helps them detected early and suppress attempts to change the very system which gives them immunity for their crimes, non-Pedophile people in positions of power support it for very similar reasons only they want the system protected so that they can stay in power, maybe because they like power or because of the money and priviledges they get from their position in that system, and big companies selling media to users support it because it lets them more strongly bind copies of that media to specific users hence people can't share it (for example, two sibblings in the same house using the same device can't share a single copy of a game) so those companies sell more copies hence make more money.
Reducing most people's choices can serve different stakeholders who have different desires and for whom that reduction of the choices of consumers serves different objectives and yields different returns.
Trying to come up with a Theory of Everything for it is excessivelly reductionist and even simplistic - just because it's easier to get one's mind around a "they're all the same" explanation than around something like what I'm putting forward, doesn't mean the former is the right explanation.
Dave's not here man
Gamestop has become TOO POWERFUL!
That power up rewards card was more powerful than we all thought I guess.
given who's running that show these days, i wouldn't shed a tear if they got run out of business.
Many people here are. People will lash out over the smallest thing. There are a lot of cool people too, but I highly advise using the block feature liberally. The jerks can really be a buzzkill as they truly love to judge your entire life by one comment and they truly love to imagine you're the worst version of you they can imagine. So yeah, strap in. I think overall, the communities here are worth it, but there are times that assholes make me doubt that. Block instances, communities, and users who make you feel that way. It's definitely a far superior experience to reddit even given the assholes, though.
I just don’t read 99% of people who respond to my comments, I don’t reply to basically anyone and I don’t really check messages. I’m not obligated to do that so I’m not going to, don’t feed the trolls.
🏴☠️
🫃
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.
I 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're replying to
[email protected]’s latest alt.. It's soo obvious when you look at his profileYou 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.
Killing ownership is the objective, killing the secondary market is collateral
Same for every industry, that means we know what we need to focus on
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.
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.
they want us to pay constantly, forever.
it will not stop unless its stopped.
Capitalism loves planned obsolescence, artificial scarcity, and rental everything.
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.
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.
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.
We must get more casual users here to balance it out
There is more than one benefit to ending physical media.
If you thought it was just about the resale market I have some public landmarks for sale.
No, but the fediverse has a good portion of the crazier parts of the left wing (and they are very vocal). If it bothers you, go heavy on blocking the worst offenders and you'll find that most lemmings are pretty chill. We're "just" nuts enough stray from the mainstream platforms where most normies hang out.
I for one look forward to the day when I can recommend the fediverse to at least my left-wing friends w/o them questioning my sanity.
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.
When I was young we used rent games from the stores. Just sayin
There is such a huge library of games made over the previous 30ish years. We really need new console games? Fuck it. Bring back vintage games. They were fun then and they are fun now
Yes, I would like new games please. Not necessarily console related, just I don't want to be stuck in the past, I would like to have new good experiences in my favorite medium thank you very much.
Their greatest competition is games that already exist. They want to transition to experiences as the service, to ensure you can't provide yourself with an experience that doesn't get them paid. This is much wider than video games, it's all media, from books to movies to music to videos games to dating and relationships. Controlling everything we value is the goal.
I saw another comment on lemmy that was like "everything you like in life is a market inefficiency"
Capital must consume even the universal soup!!
I think that big game publishers have found that there's a real ceiling for what people are willing to pay for games, and direct digital sales are the only way they can drive up their share of that amount.
Game prices have not kept up with inflation over the past 30 years. If you cut the production costs and you cut out the reseller's margin, that equals more revenue for first-party titles. And it further sweetens the pot for console companies because they can take a cut of third-party titles that go through their stores. (Third-party developers still save on physical production and distribution, so it's a win for them, too.)
Not to mention the overall move toward software-as-a-service subscriptions across the board. If they can take your one-time $70 purchase and convert it into a monthly $5 subscription fee, now you're paying $130 for the first year and $60 per year afterward for that game.
I have games from 25 years ago that I still play. I feel really sorry for young gamers because they probably won't even have the option to revisit some of their old faves 25 years from now.
(I'm working my way through Castlevania: Circle of the Moon right now. It's not the best entry in the series, but it has its charms.)
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.
Yes, mental.
(it's a mirror of humanity)
I've won so many arguments on this website it's actually insane.
Congratulations, I think?!
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.
Okay
The high sees be looking better and better
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.
Ready, player one.
Threadiverse does this often.
It even uses the “worth reading” system as an incorrect way of saying “I dis/agree.” Can't wait for pylova to become the norm.
In some countries, resale laws exist to deter this. So this argument is kinda naught.
I'm new to Lemmy, so I literally don't understand your first point, but-
I don't see how. The only resale laws that I can find in the US, UK, Eu or even Japan refer to prohibiting Digital Resales. Even in Japan, publishers haven't been able to prohibit the reselling of physical games.
So no, the point stands; Publishers want to get rid of physical media in order to push people onto digital licenses, which are more restrictive and non-transferable.
I have no idea where you're getting your info, or if you're somehow misunderstanding me, but literally everything you just said is wrong.
It is 100% legal to resell any physical media you own in all of those territories. If I buy a game on a disc, I can then do whatever the hell I like with that disc, including sell it back to the place that sold it to me, who can then sell it to somebody else.
This isn't a matter of opinion we can debate, it's clearly settled law. If you disagree, you're wrong. End of discussion.
As for the whole upvote/downvote thing, I think I understand what you mean now, but in doing so I care even less as I was simply adding a point of clarification which you're focusing way too much on in order to debate the virtues of differing platforms, which is both boring and tiring.
You're a very frustrating entity to deal with.
Goodbye.
Tells me to get a lawyer, then calls for the end of authoritarianism.
Check your carbon monoxide alarm, pal.
So what do you praxis‽ Reactionism‽
What causes these kinds of responses? Brain damage? Meth?
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.
Some of us quit when we couldn't use RiF. Literally dozens of us
Make that dozens +1.
Steam very successfully destroyed the resale and lending of PC games and the same approach with digital rights management of downloads will do the same to the consoles.
Used games held the console market in balance. You knew if you didn't like a game, you could trade it and get something back, or at least buy a cheap used copy if you weren't sure on a title.
The PC game market is kept in balance by constant discounting and availability. You manage risk by saying "I'll wait a few years and get it for $4.98 instead."
The presence of secomdary sellers (Fanatical, Humble Bundle etc) and even distinct markets (GoG, itch, service games that sell through their own accounts) means Steam still doesn't have the same market-defining power Sony will in a post-disc world.
single-use codes and 'activation' were around and gaining traction before steam came about. but steam did help dig the hole and put the some of the nails in the coffin.
Not 100%, you can share your (almost) whole digital Steam game library via family share. There are very few games that block this feature.
Dude cdkeys were already a thing before steam. There wasn't really ever a secondhand pc game market.
Of course there was. It was very much alive on our schoolyard. (A "market" doesn't need a man in the middle siphoning off a profit for it to exist.)
You could write down CD keys and put them in the case, you know?
That didn't work. If you tried to play online with a CD key that someone else had already used, it wouldn't let you.
That was a small minority of games. There were video games before everybody had the internet. But even later, not every game is or was an online game. Actually most weren't, because plans were expensive and connection quality was horseshit. Also, games used to support player run dedicated servers where no such checks existed. Hell, you didn't even have to use the game's own server browsers in many cases, there were 3rd party solutions for that.
There were actually a lot of online games back in the day since lan was pretty common, but your point is mostly valid. Unless the game had online features the cdkey could be reused.
It worked with some games! I remember passing around CS1.5 and UT CD keys at LAN parties.
I'm not convinced it wasn't mostly dead before Steam, TBH. I mean I guess there was "lending" (read: copying), but there was never a "GameStop for PC games" the way there was for console games. And even the "lending" was somewhat curtailed by CD-keys and account registration before Steam existed.
What?!
You think before Steam people could resell and loan PC games like console?!
Why just make shit up? You know Steam ain't that old and people remember pre-Steam...
Right?
I think steam might be older than [email protected]...
You forgot the leading
@and your username mention turned into a mailto link.Thank you for the insight. I had no clue about the news on my own
One thing to point out is, consumers haven’t gained so much from the secondhand market; GameStop quite often took a lot of the value of the turn-in copy, and even pushed 2hand games as new.
There’s hobby stores where this isn’t the case, and obviously friends can trade/sell in private. But it’s not a lot of what tended to happen.
When looking at that $40 resale, some publishers had instead suggested “Hey, how about we sell for $35 to both of you, and neither of you can resell it.” That nets the publisher more money, and means the second person pays less. Obviously, that relies on the publisher deciding that reduction. But it’s hardly the only consumer good/service whose price is controlled by its maker that way. Try reselling used bread, or used movie tickets.
Sony are stopping production of optical drives, of which the Playstation was a tiny proportion.
So they say
Fucking obviously...
Did people really just figure out their hate for discs was the hate for resellers and rentals?
Fucking hell man, next you're gonna tell us they sell consoles at a lost to trap consumers in their ecosystem of expensive games and not out of the goodness of their heart.
If you just fucking realized this, it's better than not.
But it doesn't mean you should be listened to, because everyone that actually cares enough to string two thoughts together figured this out fucking years/decades ago.
So, like, don't buy things that aren't worth the cost, man.
Library memberships are free.
So, I assume you're making the point that, instead of buying games I should just get a library card and borrow them for free?
Well for one, that's not a service all libraries offer, but even if they did, you're raising it in response to a discussion about physical media being phased out.
How is "just get a library card" gonna solve the problem when the libraries won't have a disc for me to borrow?
Or you might just be making the point that games are dumb and we should just read books. Hard to tell.
I was not making either of those points. My first sentence was my point. My second sentence was a general statement implied to be a suggestion.
But I see from the votes that lemmy is full of people who prefer to throw money away.
So is piracy.
So many simps for valve who don't understand how valve fucked us all 20 years ago.
Just remember if valve cared at fucking skill they could offer you a resellable license.
But yeah, fuck Windows, because reasons. Lemmy.txt
You okay?
I don't want to resell anything, I don't care.
Valve has been very good to me. I can play my library on any machine I want, anywhere I want. They have kept titles available for me to download that the publisher took down.
They keep my save files, they provide overlays in game, they provide a game recording and chat system.
Everything I buy from them is so deeply narked down that reselling isn't even worthwhile anyways.
On top of all of that they contribute to a free os, including giving back upstream.
That's not simping, those are just facts. Basically so far it's the best gaming service yet.
I do worry it will go away, but all the games are also backed up locally so it really doesn't matter that much.
By the way: Valve works well in conjunction with game devs. My kids buy box sets that come with physical items (guides, books, stickers, figures, and discs) AND have valve keys. So they get the best of both worlds. Supporting indy devs is far more important than arguing about valves position in all of this.
Thats bullshit.
Gamestop killed physical stores. They bought out who they could, and did everything they could to crush the rest and push them out of business, until nothing but gamestop was left. and gamestop is an awful fucking company.
So, of course, perpetually online idiots decided to worship it and turn it into a meme stock that brought in unfathomable amounts of undeserved money.
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.
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?
I have shit that's older than I am that plays without apparent problem.
Maybe the problem is your overactive imagination
So then don't replace them :)
Why do they need to be replaced?
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?
Some countries even explicitly allow you to break DRM to make a backup copy of your physical media.
To pick one country, Germany for example: There it's called the "right to make a security copy". Paragraph 69d (nice) of the copyright law states:
That means physical copies have, legally speaking, an endless shelf life.
Ok then what is it?
Lol sure that's what it is.
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.
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.
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.