Hence why nobody should ever buy the digital-only edition of a console. You buy like one used game and make the money back. Then, you can sell that game once you're done and turn a profit over digital-only.

I bought a digital-only PS5 because I know I will never buy a physical game. I bought a handful of physical games for my PS4 and I still regret it. I gladly trade time and convenience for a little extra money.

From the perspective of a PC owner you sound like you are stuck in the 90s or early 2000s, back when you needed extra shelf space for physical game boxes at home.

Honestly? It's been probably a decade-and-a-half since the last time I bought a physical game, and I don't exactly miss it. I lived through the era of having cubic metres of space taken up by discs and boxes of games that you finished once but don't really want to get rid of since you liked them and might want to revisit them. I lived through scratched discs and reading errors crashing the game mid session or preventing installation altogether. Having a digital games library is just magnitudes more convenient in practice, and I don't mind paying for that. Especially since I buy 90% of my games on big GOG/Steam sales anyway.

Lmao. I primarily game on PC. I own hundreds of digital games. Even with it's superior sales and open market, PC struggles to beat buying a used game from marketplace or ebay. Also, are you seriously dissing physical media? The benefits of actually owning something cannot be understated. Even with Steam, you're technically just buying a revokable license to play a game. Physical media can not be revoked, it can be resold/shared, and it works offline. See: the recent PSN outage where people were locked out of their digital games for a few days. Plus, having a physical collection is just plain fuckin cool.

Sure, but this is specifically about consoles. They don't have the same open market that PC digital games have so the only way to not be price gouged is buying physical. Bluray is extremely scratch resistant. I'm sure there are extreme cases, but scratched disks haven't been a problem for 15+ years.

With physical media you are also just buying a license.

PC games don’t have an open market in the way you think. The reason digital console games are more expensive than physical is precisely because physical console games are still a thing. Digital prices are kept high to not piss off the physical stores. If digital was cheaper then the brick and mortar stores would sell way less games. Shelf space in stores is limited and if they don’t sell enough games they rather use that space for something more profitable. As such, lowering digital prices would effectively end physical game sales. Once you take physical sales out of the equation digital prices will drop. The fact digital PC games are so much cheaper proves this.

Blatantly incorrect

Why would Sony care about GameStop's share price? Physical stores already are using the shelf space for more profitable things. GameStop's shelf space is like 90% not-games now, plus they're cloning down tons of physical locations to focus on online sales. Physical games still exist because they'd lose too many sales if they exclusively sold digital games. Otherwise, they'd happily stop selling physical games since they make less money for every physical game sold. Money gained from digital-only sales is less than money lost from pissed off customers not buying your console or games at all, so they keep physical games. PC is not cheaper because there are no physical games, lol. How would less options and less competition lower prices? PC is cheaper because nobody has a monopoly on digital games so stores need to run sales to attract customers. This article is literally about Sony restricting digital sales to their own store so they can have a monopoly and artificially raise prices.

I still remember when AAA games where $30 and that cost included the disk and case, sure inflation is a thing but with digital only these games still should be cheaper, not the same or more expensive than a physical copy.

> for a little extra money Won't be "little" for long.

> Once you take physical sales out of the equation digital prices will drop. You don't really believe that, do you? Why would a for-profit company would *ever* lower the prices if it wasn't absolutely necessary?

> PC is not cheaper because there are no physical games, lol. How would less options and less competition lower prices? PC is cheaper because nobody has a monopoly on digital games so stores need to run sales to attract customers. Exactly. That's why I personally don't mind buying digital games on PC, because the PC is an open platform. If Valve decides to drop the ball and sell every game for double the price or something, I can still get and copy games via other means on my Steam Deck. If Sony decides they double the price, you're out of luck.

Isn't "little" even now unless you always buy day one.

That's the biggest problem I have with consoles. They're essentially expensive boxes that are tied to a single service, in this case PSN. You don't like their store pricing, DRM or other policies? Yeah, well, unlucky. Sell your box and buy a different one (or don't). Too expensive to play online on PSN? Well unlucky, because that's the only way to play online. If it's more expensive tomorrow, you better pay if you want online play or you'll be locked out. Xbox now locks out uncertified controllers, maybe PlayStation as well? Even their own previous controllers (DualShock 4) don't support playing PS5 games on PS5, so if you want to play a 4 player couch coop game you better own 4 controllers specific to that one console. I get it, the new controller has some new features like "adaptive triggers" - but that's entirely optional. Heck, you can play the PS5 games ported to PC with a DualShock 4 on a PC/Steam Deck.

Isn’t it effectively the same on PC but just voluntary? Nobody buys stuff outside Steam so they can do whatever they want. Long gone are deep discounts and you have to hunt for good deals on key shops.

I don’t know. Most of my games are on Steam but I have lots of games on EA, Ubisoft, Epic Games, GoG and Blizzard platforms, not to mention Battlepass. But yeah Steam is dominant but it’s third party and not controlled by Microsoft

EGS just published their sales numbers and it’s a fart compared to Steam which has the defacto PC gaming monopoly. It’d be fine if it was some open platform but it’s just another unaccountable company that prints money for being first to monopolise the market, no different from Microsoft.