alt Hacker NewsExcept it really is. I don't see how businesses don't understand how this sort of anti-customer predatory behavior, MBA stuff, is directly driving reduced sales. The PS5, for instance, has only managed 96 million sales. For contrast the PS2 managed 160 million sales to a smaller market with much fiercer competition.
And I'm one of those tens of millions opting out. The PS2 felt like a great consumer-focused value. Modern consoles feel like opting in to get kicked in the balls and squeezed for every single penny they can get out of you.
The reason modern consoles aren't selling 300million+ units is because of myopia. And the worst part is that it's a vicious cycle. They see their sales shrinking so the penny pinchers and MBAs get even nastier squeezing the ever-shrinking userbase even more resulting in less sales meaning they need to squeeze those that remain even harder and so on.
At seemingly no point is anybody asking 'Hey why do our sales keep falling even though the potential market's way larger and the competition is pretty meh?' I guess that doesn't look as good on a powerpoint slide as trying to kill the used game market and pretending it will have no knock-on effects.
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I feel this in my bones and it's a great way to frame it. My last Playstation console was a PS2 and I've also opted out of recent generations. Historically, for me, one of the benefits of a console was that you could just pop the game in, and it would always work, simply and easily.
DRM, online checks, DLC that should have been part of the base game, digital-only games, etc have ruined all that, and if that's going to be the trend everywhere I'll just stick to a PC and Steam where I have a library of games built up over the decades.
I have a Switch and feel that Nintendo provided a decent experience on their recent systems, but with the advent of "game keys" or whatever they call it on the Switch 2, they've flipped to being even worse than the digital-only systems. At least Sony isn't (yet?) trying to sell you a license on a disc to try to fool you into thinking you own a physical copy.
The next console is going to cost at least 1000 dollars, right? There's simply no way to sell hardware at 300 million units now. So I think their strategy is to abandon the mass market and sell to price unconscious consumers who will also pay more for games.
Gamers are notorious for accepting whatever abuse game companies and studios want to inflict, and then keep buying and buying. All the horrible anti-consumer technologies and business practices from DRM to games that are released unfinished, to kernel-level anti-cheats and rootkits, all are routinely done with video games because the industry knows gamers are fanatics and will put up with anything.
If gamers want to stop this, they need to stop rewarding these companies with their money.
99% of gamers who are mad about physical disk distribution going away will still buy the digitally distributed games.