Former CEO of Square Enix thinks Sony will be a benevolent Monopoly, not like the other monopolies.
Navok’s interpretation rests on a lot of maybes and charity.
It won’t.
Driving costs down doesn’t drive prices down. You may see prices stabilize and see more sales, but as you see today the digital and physical prices are the same for the first few months/years. With digital you are at the mercy of Sony, with physical you’re at the mercy of the retailer.
The only time Sony offered anything to the user as a charity was free online play and PS+ was $40 a year, but that’s because they were losing the console war with poor PS3 sales. There’s no incentive for Sony to do anything for the consumer.
I want someone to come up with a single example where a company lowered prices on a product without reducing its original size.
Apple lowered the price of the original iPhone in 2007 from $600 to $400 after 10 weeks on the market.
The Sony PSX launched at $800 (aud) and dropped to $400 a few months later when the N64 was released at $400.
It turns out that Sony had that 100% headroom all along.
Reducing costs just pumps margins. Removing competition with retail boxes will not reduce the price.
It definitely has happened, the Ford model T went down in price by more than half from $780 in 1910 to $290 in 1924.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T
Nothing like that is happening here. This is a move to reduce competition, which has never lowered prices.
This theory posits that it will force full-priced games to trend downwards, and points to the trajectory of Final Fantasy XVI’s costs on Steam to illustrate that when it budges, it budges further down.
Bro really said that because the cost goes down on Steam (due to not being a monopoly) that means that making PlayStation a monopoly (be getting rid of second hand games) would also make the prices go down?
Steam being digital isn’t the relevant part, there’d be nothing wrong with PlayStation being all digital…
If that didn’t make it a monopoly
He’s logic is predicated on publishers being able to sell Steam keys on their own without paying Steam because it didn’t “sell” thru Steam’s storefront.
And I’m pretty sure even a “steam box” doesn’t lock it to Steam store only.
This article isnt for people buying games, it’s rationale for Sony investors to ignore how bad this will be. It’s PR
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Digital game store breaks traditional supply/demand curves. Their supply is functionally infinite.