Would Cheaper Video Games Sell More ?

[Barozi]

kitler53 said:

Barozi said:

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?

@bolded
I don't know. Is there a number ? Certainly not 50.000
Steam seems to be a better example and Valve has about 350 employees and they do Steam machine and supposedly but unconfirmed still games.

Not sure what game developers have to do with it honestly.
Also I probably need to correct myself. I don't think the publishers need any IT guys at all since all (the majority) of the available games are already on the servers of XBL/PSN/eShop and not on their own. So if anything Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo would need those guys but they already have them.

As for the last question I don't really know how to answer it, since it's kinda absurd to even ask. Obviously they would likely lose their job as well, but it would be sad nonetheless. Assuming that could happen there's still no reason (for any non profit-oriented company) to artificially accelerate the job loss.
At the same time you could ask what happens if someone creates a man like robot that works just as much and as good as a human but costs much less over time or what you would play if gaming ceases to exist tomorrow... highly, highly hypothetical.