Both Xbox Series and PS5 will offer a driveless option at a massive discount. Why is there a price discrepancy between the two models larger than the cost of an optical drive? MS and Sony want you locked to digital distribution.
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This generation, especially in the last few years, has seen lots of great discounts on digital products. Constant sales, high profile give aways. Why? Because platforms and publishers are competing against preowned and borrowed disks.
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If this generation players buy in to digital editions then platforms become closed markets, they own all of the profits. Games can be priced higher.
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Within the industry there are lots of anti-preowned advocates "it's legitimate piracy". These are often the "consumer advocates" that are vocally against F2P, which makes no sense. Anyway, I digress.
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Regardless of the morality, platforms want "one sale, one player". So they're offering these platforms in two flavours: Status quo or heavily incentivising preowned killers. But why not just ditch the disc drive completely?
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Well, the platforms still need retailers (Walmart, Target, GameStop) to sell their machines and those retailers often sell them at low (even loss-making) margins in order to sell high margin discs. Also some consumers still like to own physical media, including blu ray movies.
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Fully ditch the drive and you piss off your distribution network, who might more heavily support your rival, and a section of your consumer base.
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So both Sony and Microsoft are trying to appease all parties, seemingly offering a choice, but heavily incentivising one option over the other. The upfront console purchase is expensive, knocking $100 or so off is going to be very meaningful for a lot of people.
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There are many parallels: Inkjet printers are stupidly cheap, because they can sell the ink at a price per ml more than vintage champagne. Razorblade handles cost next to nothing, but the proprietary blades cost multiples of generic blades. Sell cheap, lock customers in.
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The risk is that in purchasing a digital edition, as players, we hand over a lot of control to platforms in how we buy games and exclude loaning. Platforms then fully control the prices of games, making it much more expensive for us all to play games in the long term.
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Thinking of buying a digital edition of the next gen?
Games will be more expensive and it'll cost us more in the long run.
Plus it gives Sony and MS even more power.
Short thread...