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Comment by _joel | Hacker News Reader

Don't poke the bear then by trying to change the definition of ownership and making games download only.

Sony was already planning to do that by ending disc production entirely

Is there still a market for physical media? I assume they're transitioning to download-only because physical media are expensive to produce and most customers prefer downloads anyway.

I'm not a big market and my only playstation is a ps2, but I buy physical games when I can.

If I don't like the game, I can find someone else who will. I can easily let people borrow it. Etc. Much nicer than just a download for that.

Something like 15% of PS5 game sales are physical now and only 5-10 games managed to crack 100K disc sales in a recent year, last I heard.

Games are also exceeding triple-layer BluRay size now in many cases, and average internet speeds in the US are faster than BluRay transfer speeds. Since you've already had to install the games to internal storage since the PS3 at least (and the PS5 even has user m.2 SSD expansion), discs have just been an annoying extra step for a long time.

Also, online purchases are cheaper. Frequent sales happen, at steeper discounts than brick and mortar retailers ever have. Plenty of games were 50-75% off during the summer sale.

That being said, I've picked up a few on disc in recent years. It's a convenient way to share games in a household with multiple PlayStations and I've received some as gifts that way, since giving people a specific game as a gift in the physical world is still inconceivable to companies.

You also don't get Sony deciding to remove your access to already paid content. Bit difficult form them to physically come and steal it from your house, than change a row in a db.

They can't take the disc itself, but they can definitely stop the disc from being used if they wanted to.

Oh, just like CSS did for DVD, lol.

Also in poorer countries there are physical game exchanges. You play a game and trade it in for a new one with some money. Digital only removes this. It also destroys the second hand game market.

15% is still 40 million game copies sold, a massive number for any game console. With Sonys average cut that makes it 1.5 billion in profit margin for Sony per year.

(Of course their profit margin is higher from digital which is why they're running anti disc marketing.)

I wish y'all would learn what % actually means and that it's meaningless without the denominator. And stop dismissing successful products because you found a way to munge %.

> Something like 15% of PS5 game sales are physical now and only 5-10 games managed to crack 100K disc sales in a recent year, last I heard.

I'd be very careful about using those kinds of numbers to indicate what consumers what. Many PS5 consoles don't come with disk drives. The ones that don't were cheaper which increased their popularity. The numbers themselves are questionable after a leak showed first-party titles sold more physical copies than digital copies. https://en.gamegpu.com/news/igry/utechka-insomniac-raskryla-...

> Also, online purchases are cheaper. Frequent sales happen, at steeper discounts than brick and mortar retailers ever have.

This has not be my experience at all. Steam sales can be very cheap. The prices on the playstation store are high and tend to stay high. Retail (especially used games) prices are extremely cheap and every person who walks into a store pays the same price while the playstation store uses dynamic prices so one person might get a great deal, but if Sony thinks they can squeeze you for more money your price for the identical game can be much higher. Zero price transparency makes price tracking and discount data unreliable.

Take a look at what's happening with CDs/DVDs. People are sick of not owning their software, and they want a secondary market.

Perhaps it is us who is poking the bear, and games will become stream only!

AAA game studios are dying, consoles are dying, the bear is sick and vulnerable.

The Nintendo Switch 2 is the fastest selling console of all time. Consoles are not dying, it is just that Nintendo won the war.

That's already the intention. They just haven't managed to make it work well enough to turn every console into a dumb terminal

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