Barozi said:
kitler53 said:
Barozi said:
kitler53 said:
i think sony/ms should do what they can to make digital distribution advantageous for consumers. a lot of money would be going back into developers if you cut out the retailer, distribution, and returns. some of that can go to pulishers and some can go to justifying an price drop to $40. that should spur increased unit sales which would be good for developers.
furthermore, with the services like xbl and ps+ i think msony should lower their platform royalty. the more games they can get on their device the more compelling the device becomes. shifting their business plan to profit on hardware and services moreso than game unit sales should shift to balance of power from mobile back to console for developers looking to profit off of their unit sales.
|
Good for most consumers, but certainly bad for a lot of people who are working for GameStop etc.
Not sure if that's the ideal that anyone (not talking about profit oriented companies) should pursue.
|
meh.
my wife's great grandpa was a really rich guy owning a massive business servicing horse and carriages. lost it all when he refused to believe automobiles would ever be successful. i could cry about all the jobs lost in the horse and carriage business but it's hard to knowing how many jobs were created in the manufacuture and maintance of cars.
i've got nothing against gamestop but brick and mortar is doing poorly in all segments (not just video games). if digital distribution doesn't kill gamestop then amazon.com will. ..but amazon employes over 110,000 people and MSony employes a lot to. as long as money is being spent it's going somewhere. the jobs/work doesn't just go away,.. it moves to a different task.
|
But in this case there weren't really any jobs lost. Just transferred. Obviously not everyone of these people became a mechanic, but others without a job found a new one in that growing business.
Amazon is a similar case. It's killing retail stores and their employees, but at the same time Amazon needs more drivers to get the cargo from the harbors to the local warehouses, then many people for filling and emptying these warehouses and additional Fed Ex (or whatever) drivers who deliver the packages.
Here as you said before, the aim is to cut out the retailer (and distributor). How many jobs would be created by distributing everything digital in return?
Maybe one additional IT guy per publisher who is looking after a few new servers.
The same could happen to book stores, although that's not gonna happen in the next few months or possibly even years.
For the second part I've bolded:
none of these retail clerks get a lot of money. For 3 retail clerks you could employ 1 network administrator.*
That's a 66% job loss right there.
*numbers taken from salary.com
|
i think it takes far more than 1 IT guy per publisher...
...i mean, how many people work to keep apple's itune digital storefront up? apple directly employees over 50,000 people. how about all the jobs as game developers? we just so irrational bascially shutdown because the current economy isn't working. what happens to those gamestop employees when consoles entirely collapse because no one is profitable?
