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.

Not being publicly traded makes this _very_ different from Microsoft, actually.

Many people buy games outside of Steam. Sure, relatively speaking it's a minority and if a game is available on Steam and elsewhere, most will pick it up on Steam. But part of the reason why Steam is so good is because these other platforms exist and there's nothing actually stopping anyone from buying their games from other stores. Cloud saves, game streaming/remote play, online play, family sharing and many more features are all free/included with the game purchase on Steam and they also pioneered many of these features. Steam Workshop adds great value as well, there isn't anything remotely comparable on any proprietary console. Steam is good because it has to be in order for people to choose to use it. And "deep discounts" are the same as ever, I see some games 90% off on sales events. Sure, successful AAA titles usually don't get a big discount 2 weeks after release, but in the end the publisher sets the pricing anyway. Generally, even when comparing full price, games are just cheaper on Steam compared to PSN (10 to sometimes 20 $/€ for big titles).

No, people don’t buy games outside of Steam, I was just speaking about the numbers - that’s why Alan Wake 2 didn’t break even for a year. It’s just a monopoly that you like because it’s still convenient and don’t mind downsides. Most digital storefronts work like this. At least console players still have an option that allows them to trade/resell their games, which PC players lost ages ago, thanks to Valve.

Yes, it’s even less transparent and accountable.

You don’t have to believe me, just look at the price for PC games which are already digital-only.

> Why would Sony care about GameStop's share price? They don’t. They care about their games being on the shelves because that’s where grandma is going to pick up a game for Billy’s birthday. > PC is cheaper because nobody has a monopoly on digital games so stores need to run sales to attract customers. PSN has sales just like the stores for PC games, there’s no difference there. The difference is that the non-sale price on PC is lower. You also seem to be under the impression that digital stores work like physical ones, where the store buys their wares from a distributer and then decides at what price to sell it to the consumer, maybe even at a loss when they want to clear inventory. This is not how digital sales work. Digital stores operate according to what’s known as the ‘agency model’. They don’t set the price of the products, they just take a cut of the sale. The prices are set by the publishers. Even sales work that way, the stores don’t determine the sales price, instead they go to the publishers and say “we’re going to do a sales event, want to join in?”. For each individual game, the publisher of that game has a monopoly. There is absolutely zero competition between stores on individual games because they do not have any control over the pricing of games in the first place. The publisher set the price for each store.

> 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 That’s not how it works at all. Valve doesn’t set the prices in their store, the publishers do. Valve just takes a cut of whatever the publisher decides to charge. If a publisher for a game decides to double the price for a game, why would they do so only on Steam and not on every other store that game is sold?

It was just an example. If they only allow publishers to publish racing games from now on or whatever, you have a choice to run other software on your hardware. A console is locked down, it's a brick if the manufacturer want it to be.

I bought resident evil code in the box PC because it was cheaper that directly on steam.

In what world do you think publicly traded companies are more accountable? If anything it's the opposite.