| curl-6 said: With a physical market, I can buy PS games second hand to save money. Once that is gone, I'll be stuck paying whatever premium Sony demands, and with their digital store the only option, they'll be able to hike the price as high as they please. Heck, they may even make you pay a subscription for the privilege of using the store at all like they've just done with crunchyroll. With no regulation or competition, the customer is up shit creek without a paddle. |
Requiring paid subscription to buy games is suicidal. That's not going to happen. I don't know what's going on with Crunchyroll, but Sony does have strong competition in gaming from Valve and increasingly Nintendo. If they fuck around too much, they'll find out. I think their business may plummet within the next two or three years as a result of ditching physical and all the bad PR. If they do more dumb/greedy shit, then their failure becomes inevitable. They do ironically retain the advantage of "decent" hardware prices relative to the more direct competition. Maybe some of these crappy decisions are their idea of sustaining high profitability without increasing hardware to even more absurd prices caused by factors outside their control.
Sony doesn't control 3rd party game prices, so Playstation going digital-only shouldn't really have any impact on them. Steam is a digital-only platform, and discounts there are more frequent than consoles via 3rd party's own decisions, not Valve's.
