| Sleepyprince said: "And no, making some older games free would not translate into much profit. They might win a few new customers because of that but most of those would be people who would just play the free offerings." |
Then I would be in the vast majority, including the management of the businesses involved? That's correct.
I mean, let's break down what you're saying. First of all, offering really old games for free simply isn't going to attract all that many new customers. I'm sorry, but it's not. The people who want those games mostly have them and most kids wouldn't play them even if they were free.
Second, you want Sony to pay for this and/or you want publishers to give up a source of income going forward. If Sony were to pay for every download going forward, not only would they be losing their share of the profit, they'd be spending money. As for companies like Square, no, they're not going to give up profit for nothing, so Sony would have to compensate them. Since you're talking about ALL PS1 games, that's a HUGE amount of money.
The only possible way this could work is if it's tied to PS+ in a promotional way, to where Sony makes a deal with a specific company for their back-catalog for a limited amount of time. I can't see how that would drive more profit than the current system of promoted sales, however, so it probably isn't going to happen.
The bottom line is that there is very little incentive for Sony or third-party publishers to do this right now.
