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 3 hours ago
I can’t really name many businesses who’d be happy to part with more than a third of their customers.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 9 minutes 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.
missingno@fedia.io 10 minutes 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.
dudeface@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Not all that third would avoid buying if it was digital only
Goodeye8@piefed.social 2 hours 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 hours 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.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
That’s a preference though, not a hard loss
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 hours 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.