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Persistantthug on 27 August 2011
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Ail said:

Biggest thing in next consoles isn't going to be upgraded graphics in my view.
It's going to be full digital with consoles having HDDs big enough to handle that and upgraded versions of XBoxLive and PSN.( you will still have physical copies too if you want..). The PC market is there, the smart phone market is there, the book market is getting there, the video market is getting there, the consoles will get there...

Sony, Microsoft and publishers make more money per sale on digital sales than on sales at retails and it kills the used market. ( and it will be a good way to offset higher development costs without charging customers for more).
And what do you think make retails sales go down as a gen ages ? Yep used sales... The older a gen gets the bigger the used games sales get...

And if I am right, Nintendo is going to be totally missing the boat again as it doesn't seem to be something they are pushing on the Wii U... ( understandably as they are very focused on younger customers and holidays sales and people buy physical copies for Christmas gifts as they want to have something physical to hand out..).I mean you're not going to handle digital sales of full games with flash storage...

If consoles makers handle this right this will be a benefit for us as there is no reason to have a fixed price on digital sales the way we have for games at retail ( and this is already the case for Steam and PSN, not all games release at the same price and prices can change quickly depending on the success of a game).

 

This is a leap that is cheap in term of hardware too, a terrabyte HDD isn't a lot more expensive than a 320Gb one. The main cost is in upgrading the infrastructure of PSN and XBoxLive but that's not a cost per console at least...

 

Look at the PC market.

Used PC games sales are dead,  game price go down faster after the release and you can still get physical copies of most games for those of you that still want that medium...

This will happen because financially this is exactly what the console makers and the publishers need.

Console makers gets more money per game sold, publishers get the end of the used market. Gamestop gets F***D...


Because of the RAZOR BLADE BUSINESS MODEL that consoles are run under, there will never be a digital distribution only full console.

And because of this, Games sold online will never be cheaper than their physical copy counterpart.

 

I'm not even sure why people wish for digital distribution consoles, because we've seen nothing but failure from this model so far (ONLIVE Corp's console and PSP GO).  The PSP GO, because it was DD only, it was $250 (expensive as hell) and the price never significantly went down, even though the PSP 3000 was better hardware (larger screen and UMD drive) and was about $70 cheaper. 

 

Sorry, but I don't want to pay $800+ for a launch PS4 nor do I want to have a crappier piece of hardware because of it.  With respect.....I hope any manufacturer takes their DD only video game system and shoves it.