According to retail data, 35% of Marvel’s Wolverine sales were physical discs. This comes from Ampere Analysis (via The Game Business), which tracks sales data across major markets globally.
The data suggests Wolverine shifted 2.16 million units in September (it went on sale September 15), and a significant portion of those sales were on-disc. In Europe, 51% of Wolverine sales came from the boxed version. Zooming in, more than two thirds were physical sales in France, but two thirds were digital in the UK.
I see no🧵e read ð report. Shameful😔.
tldr
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aint gonna pay for lies… doesn’t that prove their point?
I can’t really name many businesses who’d be happy to part with more than a third of their customers.
Would they actually lose those customers though? I prefer to buy physical whenever possible, but I still buy games that are only available digitally, or sometimes games that I just can’t get the physical copy of at a reasonable price. Sony’s banking on the expectation that people aren’t just going to stop buying games altogether in an all-digital future, they’ll buy digital once they no longer have a choice.
Not all that third would avoid buying if it was digital only
- Not all of them would stop buying game
- Reatilers take a huge cut of the profit from physical sales
- Physical media costs more to produce
- Physical media can be resold
- Future consoles would cost more if they needed to handle physical media
Going digital-only is absolutely going to be more profitable for Sony. It’s why they aren’t backing down on this at all. There’s simply no business case for keeping physical games alive.
Those numbers are probably inflated by customers “sticking it to Sony” because the purchases are done after Sony announced killing physical.
As for parting with a third (or more realistically a fifth like the former PS boss mentioned), that’s just a simple math question. Is the cost of keeping factories running, studios creating “masters”, keeping the supply chain active, factoring in the retail margin and maybe some other cost factors I don’t remember off the bat. Is all of that worth keeping 20% of the customers around? The profit margin, compared to selling digital directly, is probably non-existent.
A console business largely lives and dies by how many customers it has in the first place, so cutting out double digit percentages of them sounds like a hell of a bad idea to me. As an anecdote, I’ve got friends who buy plenty of digital games on consoles because there is no physical option, but when physical is an option, they do so. That sounds like you could easily convince them to just buy everything on digital then, right? Well, maybe not. If physical is never an option, they’d wonder why they bother with a console in the first place, since they can’t save money on used copies (either selling a new copy and recouping some cost or buying used at a discount) ever. At that point, why not just play on PC where the online is free and the discounts are better? With no disc drive, they lose most of their reason for playing on console at all.
Anyway, it looks stupid to me to cut out the physical market in the 2020s, and I haven’t even bought a physical game for 4 years.
That’s a preference though, not a hard loss
You’re right that we don’t know how many customers they’d lose, but it’s up to 1/3 of Wolverine players, and that’s pretty enormous. I think if you get hyper fixated on one data point too, you can make a stupid decision that loses the forest for the trees.
These customers had the option to purchase a digital copy, but preferred to either drive to a store or wait a few days for a delivery. That means a lot.
Either that, or they don’t have access to high speed internet and relied on the physical copy to get the game in a reasonable amount of time.
Sony must surely have some alternate motive for this, since it’s clearly going to cost them a fuckton in sales.
They want to annihilate the second hand market, so every copy sold is through them. Trading in your old games you don’t play to buy the next one is a staple of console life for many, but Sony doesn’t get a cut of the second hand games sold.
CeX is the place to go to get games near me, seeing as Game got swallowed by Sports Direct and hollowed out leaving Smyths, Argos and supermarkets the place to buy new games. Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft would love CeX to implode but it won’t happen whilst there are a steady stream of console gamers trading in the latest games to pick up an older one they never played or a random movie.
They’re transitioning the facility used for disc pressing into making microlenses for their optical sensor division (which is the most profitable part of Sony)
Well that’s an interesting theory, do you have a source for that? Im not seeing anything in search.
They’ve publicly declared to their investors that they can’t expect a growth market anymore (perhaps because of RAMpocalypse, or maybe consoles were just tapped out anyway), so they’re instead focusing on maximizing revenue per user.
And how is this contributing to “revenue per user”?
When you can no longer play any game on your PlayStation, unless it’s through them? No lending, and nothing is ever on sale unless it’s approved by them and they get their cut?? Yeah, that’s a monopoly, and even if we don’t like it or avoid the platform, they will make more money from every user who remains…
There are far higher profit margins on digital copies compared to physical.
Why wouldn’t they just increase the prices on physical copies to compensate?
Historically, because they don’t want to piss off their brick and mortar retail partners. Someone like Walmart would just stop carrying their product if they’re getting a raw deal out of it. These days, Nintendo is doing exactly that, but at some point, if Sony’s charging $90 physical for a $70 digital game, you’re already convincing your customers to just stop buying physical anyway, so they’ll also save the money they’d have to spend on manufacturing the disc drive in the first place.
Someone like Walmart would just stop carrying their product if they’re getting a raw deal out of it
But they’re already getting screwed. Better a $10 price increase than no product at all?
Have you seen how anyone reacts when prices are raised, especially on video games?
Yeah, they whine and complain and keep fucking buying it.
Keep in mind that Sony can also be betting that not everyone will stop buying completely. Just because 35% bought this game physical does not necessarily mean that when they stop selling discs, they lose 35% of sales. Only half, or a third, or a quarter, might stop, and Sony might be betting that most will just suck it up and continue buying.
Another greed grab unless they can ensure that bought copies can be played indefinitely.
For this particular game I can only imagine physical sales were from gamblers that wanted a future collectible like E.T. Atari cartridges and actually predicted correctly.
