| Landguy said: Negligible? I would like some proof that would say that any reason is bigger than another. Besides that, I don't disagree that when DRM in it's infancy 15 years ago was all to do with thieves. Sony was one of the biggest pushers in this area. THey came up with or supported almost every version anti copying technology. They were big into creating ways to stop the thieves. They even were trying to put the codes that come with discs into music CDs at one point. BUT, technology and the internet actually stopped them from being able to do it. As fast as they could create a new thing to stop the thieves, the work around was put onto the internet within days. The reasons in 2014 are not just thieves any longer. The technologies that were created to stop thieves opened the door to basically all companies to ask themselves "what else can we get from this". As it turns out, they are now seing that in the long term, they will control the users and their buying habits. They get the benefits of no thieving for free. People have accepted buying online and even having to sign into steam/origin/ea/ios/PSN/XBL or whatever to play their games. The need to worry about the theft aspect is decreasing every day as more and more people accept the daily DRM of signing into a service. There will probably be a niche market for gamers 3-5 years from now to still buy games on disc, but that may not be the case. Like you said, whay take the chance that a disc will be copied when the majority of the users don't mind the DRM. |
Fair enough, no proof given, therefore what I say is bullcrap. However I struggle to understand how games put into disc based retail that sells 500k new (tracked) copies (a) doesn't make a profit (b) of those 500k, how the lose of maybe 5k extra used game sales will make a difference in these overall profits.
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/less-than-half-of-gamestops-customers-know-they-ca/1100-6421309/ This article says Gamestop used games sales counts as $1.2 billion in revenue, their overall revenue according to 2009 wiki is over $9 billion. And they are one of few modern outlets that do used games sales (most online stores don't).
I understand your other points. Sure there are ways around the loss of income by opening up new revenue angles but used games should be included in that, as for many people it's how they buy, exchange and play games contantly instead of buying one games and that's it. If they don't want people to buy used and want then to buy digital then they have to make the prices competitive instead of just expensive.
Oh and just so you know: http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-mobile/5901188/cd-album-sales-fall-behind-album-downloads-is-2014-the
Don't expect disc based games to become a niche market any times soon if even music digital sales are only just outpacing CD sales.
Hmm, pie.
