These customers had the option to purchase a digital copy, but preferred to either drive to a store or wait a few days for a delivery. That means a lot.
Either that, or they don’t have access to high speed internet and relied on the physical copy to get the game in a reasonable amount of time.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I can’t really name many businesses who’d be happy to part with more than a third of their customers.
dudeface@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Not all that third would avoid buying if it was digital only
TheHobbyist@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Maybe not for a console they already have, but a future Sony console which can only play digital games?might influence their buying decision…
missingno@fedia.io 2 weeks ago
Would they actually lose those customers though? I prefer to buy physical whenever possible, but I still buy games that are only available digitally, or sometimes games that I just can't get the physical copy of at a reasonable price. Sony's banking on the expectation that people aren't just going to stop buying games altogether in an all-digital future, they'll buy digital once they no longer have a choice.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Those numbers are probably inflated by customers “sticking it to Sony” because the purchases are done after Sony announced killing physical.
As for parting with a third (or more realistically a fifth like the former PS boss mentioned), that’s just a simple math question. Is the cost of keeping factories running, studios creating “masters”, keeping the supply chain active, factoring in the retail margin and maybe some other cost factors I don’t remember off the bat. Is all of that worth keeping 20% of the customers around? The profit margin, compared to selling digital directly, is probably non-existent.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
A console business largely lives and dies by how many customers it has in the first place, so cutting out double digit percentages of them sounds like a hell of a bad idea to me. As an anecdote, I’ve got friends who buy plenty of digital games on consoles because there is no physical option, but when physical is an option, they do so. That sounds like you could easily convince them to just buy everything on digital then, right? Well, maybe not. If physical is never an option, they’d wonder why they bother with a console in the first place, since they can’t save money on used copies (either selling a new copy and recouping some cost or buying used at a discount) ever. At that point, why not just play on PC where the online is free and the discounts are better? With no disc drive, they lose most of their reason for playing on console at all.
Anyway, it looks stupid to me to cut out the physical market in the 2020s, and I haven’t even bought a physical game for 4 years.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Reading it back I think I’ve might’ve come across as defending the decision. I am and I’m not. I do think what Sony is doing is stupid and in the simple digital vs physical argument they shouldn’t be getting rid of physical. That said, I think the real problem that people are feeling but maybe not being able articulate isn’t getting rid of physical, it’s getting rid of what physical represents. For the PS physical media is an alternative to the PS store. It gives customers some control over the pricing because if the digital store price is too high they can go and see if they can find a physical version for cheaper (or make it cheaper by buying it full price and then selling it after you’re done). It also gives them a product instead of a license (though even that is getting somewhat questionable when the physical disc no longer contains the product but just the license to access the product), which is a stark contrast to the PS store where Sony will happily revoke your licenses if you don’t do exactly as they say.
Without the physical option Sony gains effectively complete control over the pricing of PS games and how the sold licenses get used. Had Sony approached this from the perspective of the consumer they should’ve seen that to go digital only they need to do more than just go digital only. This is a hypothetical but I imagine there wouldn’t have been any real controversy if Sony had announced two more things with the digital only announcement. Open up the platform to third party storefronts (realistically that along would’ve shut up most people because now everyone is giddy at the thought of Steam coming to the PS) and give consumers (some) digital ownership of purchases done from the PS store such as being able to transfer your license to another user. You’d still get physical media fans being upset but that would be nowhere near as big of a outcry as what Sony is currently getting.
But Sony went with the MBA number crunching solution which I described before. Who cares what the customers want as long as the balance sheet looks positive.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Going digital-only is absolutely going to be more profitable for Sony. It’s why they aren’t backing down on this at all. There’s simply no business case for keeping physical games alive.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That’s a preference though, not a hard loss
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You’re right that we don’t know how many customers they’d lose, but it’s up to 1/3 of Wolverine players, and that’s pretty enormous. I think if you get hyper fixated on one data point too, you can make a stupid decision that loses the forest for the trees.