MCV : UK Consoles games market is nearing 50% digital tipping point

[LAA]

I don't care about sales personally, but you should consider that if digital allowed publishers to set their own prices then they could make games cheaper, because they wouldn't have to give retail a cut. Someone would inevitably do it to get a leg up on the competition and everyone else would follow suit.

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Thanks for sharing the reasoning.
Logically what you're saying makes sense, technically they could charge less for digital due to not having to give retail a cut.
However...

1. This is publishers we're talking about here. I really doubt publishers ESPECIALLY, will make digital game prices lower. Especially when a lot are fine with putting microtransactions and f2p elements in.

2. Digital prices should already be cheaper now, but they're not. We have no true ownership and they don't need to make physical products to send to us, which is probably worth like £2ish at least to make, but we don't even see that.

So honestly seeing this.. truly worries me more than anything. Just giving publishers exactly what they want, and more and more, they've shown they'll get milk every penny they can feasibly get, so a digital only future, (which seems bad ok the present now honestly), where people have no choice other than PSN/XBL, where publishers control the pricing, does not fill me with excitement. Can never see PSN/XBL being similar to how PC digital is now where you can at least get keys cheap elsewhere.

The only positives I see for certain in an all digital future are there wouldn't be multiple different retailer pre order bonuses anymore and wouldn't have to change discs. I also see them getting more money as it's going more directly to them as being potentially a good thing, but I don't think they really need as much more money as they claim. Marketing costs I feel should be cut way more sooner than anything else. I know a ton of games that have sold well just by word of mouth and the community in the end and marketing seems to cost as much as the entire game in at least some game's cases.

I do wonder why/How most of the 50% doing digital do it? I imagine a fair chunk gameshare which would make sense to me, But I don't imagine most of the people would do that, which I struggle to see value in it for them at that stage, other than convenience and possibibly impatience.

Gamestop actually did pull a bunch of Square/Enix games off the shelf a few years ago to punish them for releasing something cheaper digitally.

And yeah, we are now entering a point where retail doesn't have as much power to pull off their cynical bullshit because digital is finally ruining them.

We'll see if the prices go down.

Another aspect to this shit-show is that if retail didn't initially fuck over customers by forcing publishers to sell at MSRP with strong arm tactics, games would have been 5-15 dollars cheaper digitally. But now that publishers have been forced by retail into price parity for so many years, people are used to digital games being overpriced so there is less incentive for publishers to drop them,

The point being, the reason that digital games are more expensive than retail is almost entirely due to retail threatening publishers.

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Wow didn't know that. Sucks. As you say, we're showing 50% of us will still pay at that price anyway, they have no incentive to drop it now, So I'll be surprised if that happens. Really I do have no problem with going Digital, (I do with switch with its limited capacity though), but the idea of it costing more than physical (and losing a bunch of benefits with it) totally puts me off, But if they were at least the same, only benefits that I would lose and think about are getting the game days early (which I've become more patient about anyway), and I can't sell or trade in (something I've not done in a long time, But the idea of losing that choice entirely is still a concern)