Sony already stated they will be selling physical media with PS5 if I’m not mistaken. They’re not trying to wipe out your rights, not yet anyway. Microsoft has been less adamant about it, but I think they’re still selling boxed products too.
Yeah, MS also said Scarlett will have a disc drive.
Getting hung up over a disc in a box seems odd given how much server side stuff many games utilize these days. Going to end up with a bunch of nice coasters I guess.
…and of course we all know that discs, while often cheaper, are also usually obsolete within the first week of release thanks to patches.
Ownership is fast becoming a myth of videogaming, and it sucks.
You can resell a disc or buy it used. That’s a major advantage.
Soon the publisher will take a cut on resale.
The only way to prevent or control resale of a physical read-only medium is to make users register a unique code included in the package, as with a MMO. I have no doubt they’d cross that line if they could, but so far that hasn’t happened.
They are not entitled to that. Not one bit.
EA already did.
Which game? I thought I remembered someone trying it and being rebuffed, but it slipped my mind. Then they tried including “free DLC” vouchers in the box which is kind of adjacent to what I was talking about, but not the same deal.
Remember the Online Pass for sports games?
Ahh yes, that’s another adjacent tactic. Not the same thing, but close.
Didn’t they already try that with Project 10 Dollars? It… failed.
Oh really? I hadn’t heard of that.
Lot’s of sources about it, but yeah Decs pushing against used games, rallying around each other to destroy used games… not new. It comes up over and over and over and over and over again.
I wonder what would happen if Google or Microsoft allowed people to transfer their licenses and created a storefront to allow used game sales. They’d of course take a cut, and maybe the price would be set by them based on supply and demand.
Probably unrealistic, because I think they’d rather just eliminate used game sales all together, but interesting to think about.
MS was talking about doing that in the Xbone pre-release cycle, back when it was going to be always-online and really about watching TV shows anyway. Once they bowed to the immense backlash, they stopped talking about it.
What would happen is that the platform would loss all third-party developer support.
If price was set by supply & demand, definitely. But they wouldn’t do it that way. They would pay the seller $6 in store credit for a recently released game and then sell it “used” for $54, making $48 on the total transaction, and then they would split that with the studio.
And even though $54 is a ridiculous price for something used, it’s a digital entitlement so it’s exactly the same as a new game. So the studio sold it new for $60, and then “used” for $48, and made money on both transactions. Microsoft gets a taste, studio takes their piece, and the consumer saved six bucks on a new game.
Now the studio might think they could have made $60 on that sale, and they might be right. Or they might be wrong, and maybe the small discount reeled that consumer in. Used copies will be rare in the first couple weeks as everybody’s still playing the game, so the studio still got their enthusiasts to kick in $60 anyway. I think it makes sense.
If such a system was implemented I think what we will see is fewer price drops for new games since there will be a way for publishers to target price sensitive customers w/o doing so.
That said, I would still imagine that the average price of games will still go down slightly since there will be one less middleman involved in the ecosystem (i.e. GameStop)