| Machiavellian said: Its not persuading if your only option is digital. No one would view it as such. You can give it whatever name you want but its the perception that will win out on how people view it. As we have seen already, when choices are limted, consumers view it as a negative not a positive. The problem with giving consumers free stuff is that the expectation will be that you need to give me something more than a great game to get my money. There are plenty of examples where consumers to not appreciate such things and only feel more entitled when developers go this route. Basically is like a girlfriend. If you start the relationship giving a lot of stuff, you have to continue to do it as the expectation will be that this is the norm not the exception. |
I really get the sense you aren't reading my posts before responding. I am not suggesting your only option should be digital. I am suggesting that they sell digital copies more cheaply than physical copies. They represent a worse value, so selling them for the same price is ludicrous. You want to know why digital hasn't taken off on consoles? That's why.
But it's not entirely true that going digital only is seen as a negative. No one complains that XBLA or PSN games are strictly digital. It's just accepted that those games can't maintain a retail presence. The Xbone was seen as anti-consumer because it was pushing digital. It was seen as anti-consumer because it maintained a retail presence while making physical copies restricted in much the same way as digital ones, something that had no tangible benefit to the consumer but a whole lot of benefit to Microsoft. It's called loss aversion, and if Sony hadn't offered a comparable device without those restrictions, the backlash would have been nowhere near what it was because you wouldn't have had much of an option. If you want to play those games, you would have had to deal with this bullshit. So most people would have grumbled but gotten on with their gaming in this newly restricted form.
I'm tired of going round and round and saying the same things over and over again, so I think this will be my last word on it. If used game sales are so awful for the industry, then the industry needs to combat them in a way that doesn't degrade the consumer experience. It's as simple as that. You can call consumers entitled, but they are no more entitled than an industry which tends to spend more money than it can afford to spend on a given game and then blames the consumer when they didn't want it, largely because most AAA games look suspiciously similar to every other AAA game. This homogenization and poor budgeting is the real threat. If the industry shifted to digital tomorrow, the cost savings would be eaten up in no time flat if budgets continue to explode as they have done and if game makers don't start trying to broaden the audience instead of narrowing it to people who want to play some permutation of Battlefield of Duty or Gears of Uncharted.
Step 1: Get budgets under control.
Step 2: Diversify the offerings.
Step 3: Profit.
