According to retail data, 35% of Marvel’s Wolverine sales were physical discs. This comes from Ampere Analysis (via The Game Business), which tracks sales data across major markets globally.
The data suggests Wolverine shifted 2.16 million units in September (it went on sale September 15), and a significant portion of those sales were on-disc. In Europe, 51% of Wolverine sales came from the boxed version. Zooming in, more than two thirds were physical sales in France, but two thirds were digital in the UK.
Sony must surely have some alternate motive for this, since it’s clearly going to cost them a fuckton in sales.
They want to annihilate the second hand market, so every copy sold is through them. Trading in your old games you don’t play to buy the next one is a staple of console life for many, but Sony doesn’t get a cut of the second hand games sold.
CeX is the place to go to get games near me, seeing as Game got swallowed by Sports Direct and hollowed out leaving Smyths, Argos and supermarkets the place to buy new games. Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft would love CeX to implode but it won’t happen whilst there are a steady stream of console gamers trading in the latest games to pick up an older one they never played or a random movie.
They’ve publicly declared to their investors that they can’t expect a growth market anymore (perhaps because of RAMpocalypse, or maybe consoles were just tapped out anyway), so they’re instead focusing on maximizing revenue per user.
And how is this contributing to “revenue per user”?
When you can no longer play any game on your PlayStation, unless it’s through them? No lending, and nothing is ever on sale unless it’s approved by them and they get their cut?? Yeah, that’s a monopoly, and even if we don’t like it or avoid the platform, they will make more money from every user who remains…
By deciding what each user can and be willing to pay. Everyone gets different pricing via their account on the store based on their purchase history. Can’t do that with physical discs.
There are far higher profit margins on digital copies compared to physical.
Why wouldn’t they just increase the prices on physical copies to compensate?
Historically, because they don’t want to piss off their brick and mortar retail partners. Someone like Walmart would just stop carrying their product if they’re getting a raw deal out of it. These days, Nintendo is doing exactly that, but at some point, if Sony’s charging $90 physical for a $70 digital game, you’re already convincing your customers to just stop buying physical anyway, so they’ll also save the money they’d have to spend on manufacturing the disc drive in the first place.
But they’re already getting screwed. Better a $10 price increase than no product at all?
Have you seen how anyone reacts when prices are raised, especially on video games?
Yeah, they whine and complain and keep fucking buying it.
They’re transitioning the facility used for disc pressing into making microlenses for their optical sensor division (which is the most profitable part of Sony)
Well that’s an interesting theory, do you have a source for that? Im not seeing anything in search.
Not theory. I copied their comment straight into search and got this: https://mp1st.com/news/report-sony-digital-transition-decided-for-some-time-disc-manufacturer-switches-optical-microlenses
(There’s a more prominent Verge article that’s paywalled though.)
Interesting! Thanks
Keep in mind that Sony can also be betting that not everyone will stop buying completely. Just because 35% bought this game physical does not necessarily mean that when they stop selling discs, they lose 35% of sales. Only half, or a third, or a quarter, might stop, and Sony might be betting that most will just suck it up and continue buying.
It’s not a bet at all. Sony already has hard numbers on gamers with mixed physical and digital libraries, how many people are using discs to watch movies, etc.
The vast majority of customers have heard zero of this news and aren’t principled in their purchases or easily compromise on them, so it’s safe enough to assume that anyone who primarily buys physical games but has bought digital before will still fully transition over out of necessity.
Only Sony knows these numbers, but whatever they are, they’re one-sided enough that Sony is already killing off ways for them to backtrack, and Xbox isn’t far behind.