As far as publishers are concerned, the single greatest cancer they face is the resale market. When a store sells a new game for £60, the publisher makes about £20, and the store gets between £15-20, depending on how they choose to price it. The rest is the cost of manufacturing and shipping. (These are rounded estimates, it varies)
Then, a week later, when someone trades that game in and the store resells it for $40, they get all of that, and the publisher gets nothing.
From their perspective, that’s basically theft, which is why they’ve been trying for decades to put a stop to it, which they can’t, or at least make more money from secondary sales by bundling single-use codes for “bonus” content that really should be part of the main game, which people who buy preowned will have to shell out extra for.
So that’s what getting rid of physical media is all about. If they get rid of the discs and cartridges, that market vanishes.
Please don’t mistake this explanation as an excuse. All of the platform holders have had the means to kill off the retail market and usher customers onto their digital storefronts for at least a decade. All they had to do was pass on even a fraction of the savings they make selling digitally, which cuts out the manufacturing, shipping, and retailer costs, onto the customer. But they haven’t. Games cost the same on the Playstation Store as they do on the Gamestop Shelf. Sometimes more!
They could have used the carrot, but pure greed means they’re now opting for the stick.
Edit, Supplemental Question: This is my first post on Lemmy, and the responses have me wanting to clarify something- Is everyone on this platform fucking mental?
In regards to your edit: lemmy is quickly becoming an echo chamber of extreme pov’s and hot takes. You take the Reddit refugees and the Reddit banned users but leave the major casual users behind you get a lot of opinionated reactionary people in a relatively small place. Combine that with independently ran and lightly moderated servers.
I’ve been here for a while and at risk of sounding typical and repetitive of users of other platforms, it’s becoming shitty.
I honestly think every single platform that uses a vote score system is inherently susceptible to becoming an echo chamber.
The only value a vote score generates is consensus and IMO it’s not worth the cost.
Vote scores influence readers before they even engage the content. It lowers the bar of participation, partly by removing the necessity of commenting approval/disapproval, and secondarily by making approval/disapproval anonymous.
Ultimately it makes it easier for people to participate without actually contributing. It equates thoughtful with thoughtless engagement that lowers the quality of the end result.