The state of digital sales on Playstation

[DonFerrari]

Shadow1980 said:

Lawlight said:

How would you react if I tell you that 48% of the PS4 games that were sold and that appeared in the Top 30 game sold in Japan were digital? And those weren't digital only games.

You bought 0 games digitally from April 2010 to Feb 2017? I spent around $700 (I need to check my excel). You're assuming that people care about who owns the digital games. They just want to play those games.

They may not care now, but that's because a lot of people are apathetic and don't think about the consequences. I've already dealt with the down side of digital first hand. You know what happened in April 2010? Xbox Live support for the original Xbox was ended. Not too long after that, I tried booting up Halo 2 and playing some local multiplayer, only to find that my DLC maps were missing. I have no idea what happened to them. I had moved everything to my 360, which did end up having to get sent in for repairs, so maybe something happened to the data then. But in any case, $20 worth of DLC was simply gone, with no way to re-download it. I quickly realized that this fate could easily befall anything digital, not just a few DLC maps. I already had apprehensions about digital even back then (I never downloaded a full $60 game before, and only bought Xbox Live Arcade titles), but this incident firmly cemented by opinion on the format.

If gaming goes all-digital, people will start caring because they're going to start dealing with the consequences of digital media in an age where they've given up all control.

DonFerrari said:

I would say something like 20% or less of the revenues is digital-only games. Even more because from that 40% a big chunck is on DLC and other type of sales for retail games.

Yes I also find funny that people are so eager to abdicate from any sense of ownership. But nowadays most sales are done for "comfort" and "easyness" of lazy people, so as you saw in mere 3 years the digital ratio for retail doubled. So maybe in no more than 2 gens the physical editions will be the odd man out.

I have bought a lot of digital retail, but because both things happened, I didn't care enough on the franchise to own the disc and the price was a lot lower than the hardcopy.

Exactly. It's consumer apathy, much of it born out of laziness ("I don't have to get up to change discs or drive to GameStop/Walmart/wherever"). People are setting the stage for getting themselves screwed over by the industry, and they're completely oblivious to it. Maybe they've convinced themselves that this will be like Steam, but they fail to realize that PC is an open platform where anyone can open up a digital store. Steam has competition. But consoles are a closed platform, and so there are no competing storefronts on a given platform. The console maker is the sole distributor. Eliminate competition, and you've already removed any incentive to treat customers properly. They know that most consumers will consider their purchase of the console a sunk cost, and will essentially be locked into that platform's sole proprietary digital store. We already also know that many publishers have come out against the second-hand market, and MS already tried to pull an anti-used games stunt with the XBO prior to its release, which was defeated after massive blowback. MS may be playing nice now, but they could easily pull another 180 if consumers collectively decide to give up ownership rights by abandoning physical.

Despite what some people may insist, physical media and digital downloads are not functionally identical, for two big reasons:

1) They are legally different, at least in the U.S. I don't know how things are elsewhere, but according to U.S. federal law physical console games (as well as physical copies for books, magazines, movies, TV, and music) are treated as "sold, not licensed" and are covered by the first-sale doctrine. Essentially, you own your physical games, which are treated no differently from any other durable good. It's yours to sell, lend, gift, trade, or keep forever, and the copyright holder has absolutely zero say in the matter.

Digital is exactly the opposite. Digital copies of any medium are treated as "licensed, not sold." When you download a game, book, song, or movie, you don't own that download. The copyright holder does. They can and do restrict your ability to dispose of that copy, and whatever they do allow you to do with the copy (like maybe transfer the license to someone else) they do so only as a favor. They aren't even legally obliged to offer refunds for digital downloads, and as it turns out none of the Big Three offer refunds for digital purchases (MS is testing a refund program for Xbox owners, but it has some very strict requirements for refund eligibility, and there's no guarantee they'll ever actually implement it). They can even legally take away individual titles and even entire libraries of downloads, with no compensation. There is precedent for this. It has happened. Ownership is control, and under current IP law in the U.S. you own precisely jack shit when you purchase a digital download. You're effectively leasing the games.

2) Issues of long-term availability of games. Assuming you take good care of them, your physical games will last a lifetime. Even if your system breaks, there are second-hand systems available, plus once the patents expire hardware clones become available (there are currently perfectly-legal third-party clones of every notable system on up through the 16-bit era, with PS1 clones not being too far off). Also, the existence of a second-hand market for software means that out-of-print titles are still available for purchase years or even decades later, so if there is some old game that can't be bought new in stores anymore, you can still get it if you never got around to it when it was in-print or if anything does happen to any copies you own. There is a large and vibrant second-hand market for older games, and one doesn't have to look far to find old 2600, NES, SNES, Genesis/MD, or N64 carts.

Meanwhile, digital has already displayed shortcomings in this area. We already have two platforms (the Xbox and DSi) which have ceased being supported by their manufacturer, with digital stores being closed (while it hasn't happened yet, Nintendo did say, and I quote, "The ability to re-download purchased content will also stop at some point"). It's only a matter of time before support for last-gen systems ceases. Same for current-gen systems. If anything happens to your library after the system is no longer supported, that's it. It's all gone, with no chance to re-download (and consoles don't allow true back-up copies, so that counterargument fails automatically). As I mentioned earlier, this actually happened to me, with all my Halo 2 DLC vanishing into nothingness under mysterous circumstances (though there was and still is a physical option, as Halo 2's DLC was released on a disc). It didn't take long for me to realize the same thing could happen to hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of content. The mere possibility of such an occurrence is enough for me to stick with physical.

Also, dozens of digital games have been de-listed from digital storefronts for varying reasons (rights issues being the most common one). When that happens, good luck downloading it after the fact. You should have been getting it while the getting was good. When a digital title is de-listed, it completely and utterly ceases to be available for purchase. It could in principle be re-listed on a digital storefront, but there's no guarantee of that, especially if some sort of rights issue is holding it up. For example, a bunch of TMNT games got de-listed from XBLA and the Virtual Console nearly six years ago, with no sign of coming back.

So yeah, I don't like the idea of digital going mainstream, because it does matter, it does fundamentally affect the nature of the relationship between product and consumer, and it is a raw deal in the long run, with every semblance of consumer ownership and control being given up for a marginal (and largely imaginary) increase in convenience. I stand in opposition to anyone who seeks to normalize digital-only.

THank you for a very through explanation for the people that never thought about it.

Talking about Brazil... CDs and DVDs even when bought physical are licenses in a way... but meaning that since you bought the right to listen or use that then you can make copies for backup without being considered piracy (sure lending, selling, etc the copy could be), and if law were to be uphold if your disc gets damaged (since it have like 100 years durability mentioned on it and you own the right to use) you should be able to request another copy (returning the old one of course).

Besides that I would say it works the same as you said.

For me to forsake all form of ownership of the disc/content it needs to be a real deal, like even after 2 years of release the new/used copy can't be found for less than 40 bucks but digital flash sale have it for 5-10, and I'm not a crazy fan of that game (if I was I wouldn't wait 2 years to buy, right?) then I go and buy.

konnichiwa said:

Shadow1980 said:

@Bolded. That's largely an issue just for online-only games. Just like digital downloads, online-only fundamentally changes the relationship between product and consumer. It used to be, and still is for most titles, that when you bought a game you bought it knowing you would be able to continue playing it indefinitely. I've been able to enjoy my NES games for nearly 30 years, and will be able to continue enjoying them for decades to come. Meanwhile, an online-only game has an artificially-imposed expiration date at some point in its life and it is utterly dependent on continued support from the publisher. Once they pull the plug on the game, that's it. Nobody gets to play it anymore, ever. One of these days, your Destiny disc will be a $60 coaster. It's for that reason why I refuse to support online-only games. I only buy games that have offline single-player, or support local multiplayer. I don't touch MMOs (I made an exception for Destiny because it was Bungie, and ultimately regretted it).

@Italicized. I've heard that "GameStop is bad for the industry and will kill physical" for years. It doesn't hold water. I wrote an article about this four years ago, and my overall argument hasn't changed. Globally, GS made $2.2 billion in revenue and $1B in gross profit off of used game sales last year. Compared to the console market as a whole, that's not a massive chunk. GTAV alone has sold at least 80 million copies new and generated at least $3 billion in revenue. The used game market has existed for a long time, including at GameStop, and yet the console market has thrived and even grown. The industry has no room to plead poverty, especially when the top five games released in a given year generate more revenue than what GS makes in a given year off of used games.

@Underlined. You can sometimes get good deals from digital, when they happen to offer good sales, but you can also find good deals with physical. Uncharted 4 can be bought new for $32 on Amazon and can be bought pre-owned from GameStop for $20, but still costs $40 on PSN. FFXV? $36.45 new at Amazon, $35 used at GS, still $50 on PSN. Nier Automata? $40 new at Amazon, $50 new and $45 used at GS... still $60 on PSN. Halo Wars 2? $35 new on Amazon, $38 used at GS, $40 on XBL Marketplace. Titanfall 2? $25 for PS4 & $20 for XBO at Amazon, $30/$27 used at GS, $40 on PSN and XBL. Most of the time, you can find a physical copy of a game several months after release for a good bit less than the regular price of a digital copy on the console's digital store. It's rare that the digital version costs less.

Also, people made GameStop win. Dealing with a middle man is easier than selling it directly to a new owner yourself, be it eBay or a yard sale or whatever, but you pay a price for dealing with a middle man. They're going to take a cut of that value. While GameStop doesn't make  much in terms of revenue off of used games,

@Bolded part, if you own it physical/or digitally the day it gets the plug it will be death (see Halo 2) but for a game like Destiny it is worse because if you hardware ever gets broken you can not download the updates/extra content for destiny anymore and all you have is a vanilla 60 bucks game.

As a fan of watching retro gaming channels it is pretty well known that Nes/Snes games battery lives are finished for a lot of games sure it is nice to play a game like FF but if you can't save it can't be that fun anymore and most collectors put the game on the shelves and play the emulated version.

Well I didn't say Gamestop is bad for the industry but why should I give money to Gamestop instead to the Devs/publishers?  In my personal opinion most deals on PSN were better than what retailers gave, Uncharted 4 was 20 Euro months ago on PSN;  (you can find the sales history yourself: https://psprices.com/region-us/index)

People made Gamestop win

GameStop is set to close between at least 150 stores following fourth quarter sales declines in almost all of its segments.

You can give your money to whoever you want, even like buying it new at launch, but you also decide if you preffer to be reasonably assure that you'll be able to play/loan/resell the game you bought or if you are ok with losing all for a drop of support from the same dev.