I wonder how many of those sales are on PC, where physical copies aren’t available. I also wonder what the breakdown is per-game.
Wait, that can’t be right–I prefer physical media. 🤔
Weird take.
“We’re not worried about potentially alienating 10% of our customers. They’ll fall in line and buy digital. We have more megaman collections to pump out from 40 year old NES games on the PS6.”
Margins on digital games are much higher, even if those 10% don’t all switch to digital they will probably still make more of a profit.
While the margins are better I think there will be a discovery knock on effect. Like how skipping theaters and straight to streaming it made it hard for the avg person to know what the “legit” games were and what was digital only my games decreasing the Perceived value to the title regardless of the actual valve is.
People act like these businesses haven’t done the math already. They did the math and people who think like we do are in such an extreme minority that even if every single physical game user boycotts entirely, they’ll still be making more money than they were before. It’s why mobile games embraced chasing whales at the cost of the quality of experience for the casual player. Fortnite was going to be an actual paid game beyond it’s current implementation, but that got dropped entirely for the free-to-play pay-for-skins cash-cow it became. If it’s profitable, they don’t give a damn if it sucks for most people.
We are in a stage of capitalism in which all available markets are saturated, and now to continue increasing profits year on year the only way to make that happen is to cater to wealthier customers who can afford the price increase that offsets the loss of the poorer customers.
I’m hoping some digital buyers understand accessibility and preservation too, though. Like, it doesn’t have to be just the 10% that show this is unacceptable.
Having said that, I know gamers, as a whole, are terrible at voting with their wallets.
I dare say that games are preserved more through digital means then by physical media though. You have plenty of sites keeping different versions of a number of games, old or new, without any form of DRM (or bypassed) on PC (through “piracy”, as ironic as it may sound).
Physical media nowadays are mostly a form of DRM anyway - a disc that will only work on a certain system, and that usually requires you to go online to activate it anyway, which means that they won’t work after a couple of decades (or even much earlier). The biggest advantage of it, imo, is the freedom of selling/buying or trading used copies.
I mean, I’d daresay the gaming community has a large community dedicated to both accessibility and preservation, they’re just generally frowned upon because it’s, you know, piracy. However, only through piracy can I get an original release copy of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 for PlayStation, Dreamcast and Windows. You can only get re-releases, remakes, and the like, often which do not hold up to the original in terms of style and control.
They’re reassuring their investors to remain optimistic about their investments. Besides, some amount of that 10% will shift to digital, as it’s been trending that way, where they get higher profit margins, so it might come out in the wash in actuality.
So looking at the projected earnings of 190,000,000,000 yen, that means they are a-okay with losing 10%, which comes out to a missing $11,996,123 in sales.
I wish I was in a position where I could shrug off 11 million dollars.
But they are saving at least 5 times that by not fucking with physical discs….
Wow, at those rates Limited Run Games must be hemorrhaging money by selling physical media at $30 a copy.
You do realize that same game costs $13 as a digital version? I can guarantee people are not going to buy a physical version of a game if it cost between $140 and $160 (assuming the same overhead as your example).
Where are you getting hundreds from? If a $30 sale is $13 digitally, that means the production overhead can be no more than $17 for the media… and it couldn’t be that high, because LRG needs a cut as well as the publisher and developer.
