This is so much bigger than the secondary resale market, which is a small added bonus for them

The move from physical media; the price of computer components rising beyond reasonable levels; the locking down of hardware; the locking down of software distribution methods; the inevitability of de-anonymizing all Internet users…

The capitalist class has had enough of your criticism. We discovered their little criminal playground that preyed on children, we discovered how they hide their wealth without contributing back to society, we even discovered how government programs meant to “keep us safe” are used to exploit everyone on earth.

You think Sony ending physical discs is about video games? Brother it’s about the mind prison they’re designing to keep you in line while they fuck preteens on yachts until this whole planet burns to the ground

Gamestop has become TOO POWERFUL!

Is everyone on this platform fucking mental?

Many people here are. People will lash out over the smallest thing. There are a lot of cool people too, but I highly advise using the block feature liberally. The jerks can really be a buzzkill as they truly love to judge your entire life by one comment and they truly love to imagine you're the worst version of you they can imagine. So yeah, strap in. I think overall, the communities here are worth it, but there are times that assholes make me doubt that. Block instances, communities, and users who make you feel that way. It's definitely a far superior experience to reddit even given the assholes, though.

🏴‍☠️

They could have used the carrot, but pure greed means they're now opting for the stick.

By raising the prices for all their games, raising them again for physical copies, and allowing the use of game key cards, Nintendo decided the carrot or stick alone just wasn't profitable enough, and thus chose both.

Killing ownership is the objective, killing the secondary market is collateral

Is everyone on this platform fucking mental?

This is about removing any and all ownership rights of buyers.

Not just of selling you copy second hand but also things like lending (even to your own family), gifting and even playing it in a different device

Mandatory Age Checks on the device also helps with stopying lending even to members of your family that live with you and use the same device to play the game: if the hardware (with the excuse of Age Checking) identifies the user, then the copy can be bound to a specific person in a specific devive rather than the device alone, so for example two siblings in the same household need to buy two copies to play it even at different times rather than just one copy as the "age check" identifies the user and only allows a specific user for a specific copy.

The fewer rights buyers de facto have, the more copies publishers sell as users can't get the games by alternative legal means, and whilst at first there might be some backlash from taking those rights away, in my experience not only are most gamers sheeple or at best dogs that bark a lot but don't bite, but usually they over time get used to not having those rights (especially as new, younger people, who grew up without having had them become gamers), so pretty much all backlash from taking those rights away eventually dissapears and those companies end up making more money than before.

Same thing happened to the home video market. No more dvd sales and resales. Everything gets funneled into subscriptions.

This killed a lot of Indy films and films that had weak releases can no longer recoup any money via dvd sales. So more of those films simply don’t get made anymore

they want us to pay constantly, forever.

it will not stop unless its stopped.

In regards to your edit: lemmy is quickly becoming an echo chamber of extreme pov’s and hot takes. You take the Reddit refugees and the Reddit banned users but leave the major casual users behind you get a lot of opinionated reactionary people in a relatively small place. Combine that with independently ran and lightly moderated servers.

I’ve been here for a while and at risk of sounding typical and repetitive of users of other platforms, it’s becoming shitty.

Capitalism loves planned obsolescence, artificial scarcity, and rental everything.

There is more than one benefit to ending physical media.

1. The end of the resale market
2. The end of paying for physical distribution.
3. Pushing users toward online gaming so that they can pay for microtransactions.
4. Live service games and seasons that require subscriptions.
5. The sale of hardware that will allow them to charge more for consoles/Harddrives.
6. Game streaming (which requires an internet connection, and allows them to gather information about users).
7. Game streaming that requires a whole separate online subscription.

If you thought it was just about the resale market I have some public landmarks for sale.

Supplemental Question: This is my first post on Lemmy, and the responses have me wanting to clarify something- Is everyone on this platform fucking mental?

No, but the fediverse has a good portion of the crazier parts of the left wing (and they are very vocal). If it bothers you, go heavy on blocking the worst offenders and you'll find that most lemmings are pretty chill. We're "just" nuts enough stray from the mainstream platforms where most normies hang out.

I for one look forward to the day when I can recommend the fediverse to at least my left-wing friends w/o them questioning my sanity.

Rent Extraction is the objective, and I partly disagree that killing the secondary market is the blanket objective. Look at ticketmaster. They sell the tickets, then they also take fees on the resale of those same tickets purchased by customers/scalpers. They profit twice thanks to the secondary market. Doesn’t work (yet) for something like books, but give it time.

The general objective is to force everything to subscription and also force upgrades thanks to them controlling EOL for everything. They never want to give users the ability to run their own servers for sunsetted services.

When I was young we used rent games from the stores. Just sayin

I think that big game publishers have found that there's a real ceiling for what people are willing to pay for games, and direct digital sales are the only way they can drive up their share of that amount.

Game prices have not kept up with inflation over the past 30 years. If you cut the production costs and you cut out the reseller's margin, that equals more revenue for first-party titles. And it further sweetens the pot for console companies because they can take a cut of third-party titles that go through their stores. (Third-party developers still save on physical production and distribution, so it's a win for them, too.)

Not to mention the overall move toward software-as-a-service subscriptions across the board. If they can take your one-time $70 purchase and convert it into a monthly $5 subscription fee, now you're paying $130 for the first year and $60 per year afterward for that game.

I have games from 25 years ago that I still play. I feel really sorry for young gamers because they probably won't even have the option to revisit some of their old faves 25 years from now.

(I'm working my way through Castlevania: Circle of the Moon right now. It's not the best entry in the series, but it has its charms.)

Their greatest competition is games that already exist. They want to transition to experiences as the service, to ensure you can't provide yourself with an experience that doesn't get them paid. This is much wider than video games, it's all media, from books to movies to music to videos games to dating and relationships. Controlling everything we value is the goal.

There is such a huge library of games made over the previous 30ish years. We really need new console games? Fuck it. Bring back vintage games. They were fun then and they are fun now

It happened to PC games. Sure, Steam will do a big sale twice a year, but you hear about people with massive libraries of games that they've never played and can't get rid of. In ye olden times, they'd be in the game shop used bin.