By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
kitler53 on 25 August 2014
Edit Thread
SvennoJ said:
Birimbau said:
Ownership is dying. People don't care about owning things anymore as long as it has affordable prices and works properly. Gamers seem to be the last wave of consumers that care, it is just a matter of time until they finally accept the cloud in the future. Netflix is huge, Hulu is huge, Spotify is huge, iTunes has been forced to do streaming and bought Beats in large part for their brand and streaming service. The age of people owning all this content is over.

And 1 day people will realize what they have lost. Vinyl is regaining popularity, CDs refuse to die, blu-ray sales are still going up although slowly and print books will never disappear. I doubt the cloud will ever fully take over. It works great for things people didn't want to own anyway, physical rental is what's really dying. Netflix and Hulu are mainly competing with cable TV, movie network etc after killing of rentals.

I have no experience with Spotify, I'm happy with CDs and radio. No need to have internet at my pool, damn wifi hardly reaches the living room. The only time I have listened to internet radio was while playing ets2. Driving a truck through Poland feels more immersive while listening to a local radio station.

you have to understand though,.. CDs are a withered technology.  as are vinyls and dvds too.   gaming is still marching along with new tech advances every decade or so.  to invest in creating a console is not a cheap endeavour and costs need to be recouped.  each generation of hardware probably needs to sell at least around 20M units in order to have any chance of recouping costs.

so either:

A) gaming technology improvements halt

B) people continue to buy new hardware at a reasonable rate.

A isn't going to happen.  as soon as B no longer becomes true physical media dies as no company is going to take on losses just to make you feel warm and fuzzy about things.  physical wont' die any time too soon but, like with CDs, the number of releases that aren't availible for purchase in physical format will increase.  stores will continue their trend of only carrying the absolute most popular titles while most content only has a digital release because they can't afford to produce the physical content without taking on extreeme losses.