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Johnw1104 on 14 March 2017
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Conina said:
Johnw1104 said:
We really should just be grateful that we have physical options, as lord knows all three major console companies have been trying to ease us into digital only for ages now. With a physical release you can own it forever, sell it if you get bored, and buy a cheap used copy later on in the future; digital's price is not subject to supply and demand, can't be resold or collected, and occupy ever increasing amounts of hard drive space as devs seem to become less concerned with optimizing their games and routinely release patches ~33% the size of their original games.

Of course digital prices are also subject to supply and demand. Otherwise we wouldn't see any sales with 20%, 40%, 50%,  60%... discounts.

All digital stores offer these temporary discounts to reach buyer groups that don't buy game X until it is priced Y $/€/£ or less. Every title is in competition with many other games on the same platform, both with the digital catalogue and with the retail offers.

The point is they're only subject to them if the distributor decides they'd like to increase their sales, and by completely controlling the price of digital offerings they can maintain higher costs than they'd have any hope of doing otherwise; games routinely remain at full or near to full price while their physical copies have plummeted, and the ease of simply downloading leads many to shrug and accept it. I've frequently scrolled through the offerings available on the respective eshops of the three consoles and been shocked to see what they were still demanding for certain games compared to what they're running on eBay, which is one of the reasons I've stopped buying anything digital if a physical copy is available.

I'm aware of the sales as I tend to wait on Steam for their summer sale (prices often drop ~75%), but not everyone does them. Nintendo is easily the worst in this regard.