He's wrong.

Studios close because they make poor choices in delivery and the game(s) they create. Spend $50million making a crap game... you lose sorry. Flesh out the ideas better and streamline your creation.

They need to focus on putting a game on all user bases as well as making quality games.

It has nothing to do with used markets and digital vs disc.

This gen has all four primary markets with similar architecture and scaling engines. Costs for this will be lower than last gen and digital stores from at least Sony and Nintendo are very easy to publish to. (Read only MS requires a publisher and high upfront costs.)

He is right that they will try to push digital. That's good. Have digital cheaper in the first place. Lower game cost form $60 to say $45 and you'll see significant change in purchase decisions by gamers to go digital all the while likely making far more money.

"More studios WILL close"

And they will probably deserve it.

Seeing the popularity of Steam, PSN, and eShop sales spiking up in digital sales. I'm sure with in five years from now, will see a push in digital sales. Today ....is not the day.

Killing used games and destroying places like Gamestop would crush the gaming industry. Fuck this guy.

Does he really think that these idiots spending a 100 million on COD clones would be suddenly be saved by millions of new sales if used gaming died? Its time to change the way we make games, stop with the huge idiotic budgets on mediocre clones and create unique games that people want to play.

Why do devs need to have a guarantee to profit. Many other industries have to deal with second hand sales and I don't hear them complaining.

That's what they should be doing, providing incentives, making people want to buy digital where they have larger profit margins, not forcing it upon everyone and removing all choice.

Over 70% of all trade credit goes towards the purchase of NEW games.

People who cant normally afford new purchases use trade in credit to buy brand new titles. If the pre owned market collapsed you would see the sales of new games drop tremendously

He still lost lol

Even if i can´t stand him, i agree with some parts. But this isn´t new, the problem started in 2006 when Sony and Microsoft started to make gigantic-cost games. Now the costs keep going up and developers KNOW that if they don´t do something (DRM, etc.) they will go bankrupt.

Yeah, I kept thinking about his stance on PC when he was with Epic, he seemed to be of a mind that PC gaming was not where it's at since piracy is killing it (according to him and some others who failed to make games interesting enough for the PC audience since Unreal Tournament) and now used games and lack of DRM is killing console gaming for publishers.

In short; Cliffy is as stupid as he is hypocritical.