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Soundwave on 12 May 2025
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RolStoppable said:
Soundwave said:

It's not really though, there's no scenario in which having some split of physical games is some how more profitable. Gamers are simply going to be forced to buy games digitally or get out of the industry, and Sony/MS/Nintendo all know the crowd of people that talk about quitting gaming entirely if they don't get physical games is a tiny actual audience. 

If you only offer digital games, people will simply just shift to digital. 

I disagree that Game Key Cards will be less prevanlent over time. I think it's going to be at least 90% of the third party game market and that's not going to be any different 2 years from now, 3 years from now. "Oooh! Let me cut my margin down by $8 a copy so I can have a physical 64GB cartridge" is not appealing to a publisher. 

When PS6 is announced in a year or two and is a digital only platform with no disc drive period, that's basically going to be the nail in the coffin for physical games, all 3rd parties will basically bail out at that point. There's not going to be a situation where 3rd party Capcom or Namco or whoever who is now used to having digital only for PS6, XBox, and PC is going to be on Switch 2 suddenly like "you know what we need to do? Pay for cartridges again". Like yeah they need that like they need a hernia. 

Next 5-6 years is going to be a nightmare for dev studios just trying to keep skyrocketing dev costs as is. 

It's certain that the industry would like to believe that gamers will simply just shift to digital when physical gets abolished, and yes, this could be true to some extent. Problem is that not all digital sales are equal, so it's likely that physical-first gamers who would have paid $70 for a physical game will only pay up to $30 for the digital version of the same game. And just like that, the entire idea of higher margins on digital games gets destroyed.

People will pay whatever publishers charge for digitally because they will have no choice otherwise, and that's basically the end of the discussion on that. If it's $70 digital, then it'll be $70 digital unless you can make your own Mario Kart or GTA or whatever. 

Even for home consoles, the disc drive is essentially useless. A Blu-Ray drive is basically like 50MB/sec max at top speed, that's pathetically slow when the SSD in the PS5 is 5500MB/sec. Discs are dead at best all they can do is hold the data so you can transfer that to your SSD, running games off the disc themselves though is pointless in today's day and age. 

That leaves cartridges, but to get equivalent speed to the UFS 3.1 internal storage the Switch 2 costs more, the same way faster speed SD Cards are more expensive than slower ones. It doesn't come for free. So you have more expensive Switch 2 software pricing. Once the whole "yeah but you can get the physical copy for the same price" thing goes out of the window so does most of the appeal of physical games. If Nintendo is going to charge more for physical games, well then the whole debate over what's better kinda goes out the window. 

Sure when you could get it for the exact same cost, that's one thing, but once gamers get a taste of having to pay more, most are going to bail out and switch to digital only. 

But even putting that aside, virtually all 3rd party games will be Key Cards, they already are, it will get worse not better once the PS6/Next XBox show up and don't have any physical media period. At best you'll have maybe a USB disc drive option for like $100+ for old disc titles assuming backwards comp is even a thing, but a disc drive in the box as a standard? That runs actual PS6 games? Who actually thinks that's going to happen. 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 12 May 2025