I feel like the price needs to come down on digital goods by a large amount, in order to make it worth my while to go digital. Currently, digital games still sell for $60 at launch and you often have to pay local sales tax on them to boot (tax on digital goods makes zero sense). Meanwhile I can still get my physical games from Best Buy with a 20% discount, 8% cash back on my credit card, and double Best Buy points. In the end my physical games often cost me $33 to $43, depending on whether or not there was a $10 gift card for pre-ordering.
I'm really rooting for Epic's new store, because I feel like a 12% take is more than fair for a digital storefront. A game could launch at $47.73 on Epic's store and still make the developer just as much money per copy as selling it on Steam for $60. And since lower priced games tend to sell more copies, developers would have an even bigger incentive to lower the price even further. I could easily see games launching on Epic's store for $45, and then permanently going on sale for half off a year later.
Finally, we need to get rid of the JC Penny style sales that go on. Marking a ten year old game at $20 and then putting it on "sale" twice a year for $10 is not a sale. It's a scheme that is designed to force impulse buys, by only pricing the game fairly twice a year. This sort of "sale" is inconvenient to people that just want to buy the game right away. Even worse, these sales on digital games often aren't even as low as physical copies go for. DB FighterZ was $23 for a physical copy on Black Friday, and that's without any of my Best Buy discounts. MHW was $30. These prices were for the game brand new. A used copy sold for even less. Meanwhile the digital versions of both games were $4 to $10 more expensive than even the new physical copies.
