Retailers often have good deals.
PSN does too.
They get those disks from companies for much lower prices than we think. Not just once I’ve seen and bought games on cartridges that were initially 70$ for just 25-45. Trusting a platform to do that thing, well… unless it is Steam or GoG. Sony is greedy asf and middle man policy is ideal measure to hold them at bay.
Retailers basically steal 15-30% of the price tag of a game.
And when a game doesn't sell, they'll just mark it on clearance and basically mark it as a loss, but they've already made their money by taking the 15%-30% during the launch. Sony/developers lose out of this 15%-30%.
"Why would I care if Sony/developers make less?" you might ask.
Well that's why we're getting less content in base games and getting upselled on DLC with "bonus content" that was supposed to be in the original game. The less Sony/developers make, the less value they put into the game you bought.
You're under the illusion that you got a game at 50% off but the value you could be getting if the middleman was cut out would be much more.
It's gotten to the point where Sony/developers can't cost optimize anymore, so it's either increase game prices to $120 ($50 game in 90's would cost this much today, inflation adjusted), or cut out the middleman to keep prices from getting out of control.
The main issue is that they want to enforce the model where you don’t own the game but the company leases it to you. It has already happened when Sony removed games and content from their store.You cannot back it up, you will just have to cope that the money you paid once are now gone. It is not like AppStore where apps that you purchased back in 2012 are still in your purchases, however I’ve seen that when developer removes app from store you can no longer access it too.
It's already happened with music and most of us are happy. Sure it sucks when an album leaves Spotify, but has that ever caused most of us to drop Spotify? nope.
Another issue is that they want to sell 100GB+ games over the Internet. This is ridiculous, their infrastructure isn’t even ready for that. It would only mean slow download speeds and long wait times for other players.
Money saved by not printing discs will go towards infrastructure providing 100GB games (which will cost less than the box/disc itself). Cloudflare provides free egress actually which Sony can use. They just pay for storage.
While disk is not ideal physical media, they should have long switched to flash drives or cartridges - they are practically indestructible. It will cost them slightly more but will make everyone happy.
Cost 10x-16x more actually. Which is why Switch 2 is moving to game-key cards where there's no actual storage on them.
Also, since they want to sell games online, if they sold them for 70$ they better drop the base price to 50 or 40, cause right now they are relying on users to cut their expenses without balancing out the price
No because as I said before, in the 1990's, games cost $50. Adjusting for inflation, we should be paying $120 for the same price game. Sony has been able to cost optimize so that we're only paying $70 which is almost half of what we should be paying.
Game dev budgets have 5000x since the 1990s and we're paying practically less than the 90's
