The Customer to Corpo Pipeline: The All Digital Lockstep
About a month ago on a livestream we were getting criticized about our stance on physical disk drives. We questioned why the PS5 Pro had no disk drive and got called all types of PC gamer and other insults. This isn’t necessarily a response to that person it just proves a point.
There’s a lot of people who claim we don’t game and are just haters. My issue with that is they ignore legit criticism and don’t want to look at the other side. They, like Sony are fine with an all digital future and don’t care for physical media. You and corporate interest shouldn’t cross on that subject.
Going full digital gets you convenience but you get locked into their storefront, lose any ability to impact the price of used games or have used games. They are already charging PS5 owners $10 more than the PC port.
More and more games are coming to PC and why is it? Sony is trying to make things look good to investors with more sales on PC. There’s an issue and sales are going down. Helldivers 2, Horizon Zero Dawn, Spider-Man, God of War 2018, Ghost of Tsushima and Days Gone all sold at least a million on Steam. Every other one has not, with Sackboy, Uncharted, Rachet and Clank, Until Dawn, God of War Ragnarok, and Horizon Forbidden West all failing to sell over a million since then. Ghost of Tsushima is the only recent game to sell over a million, and it was right at a million or possibly a little below.
There is also the issue of piracy on PC. We were not able to find exact numbers or the most pirated games. We do know most PlayStation releases on PC are usually in the top 3 or 5 most downloaded games on sites that host them. Games like God of War, Horizon and Ghosts of Tsushima will stay in the Top 100 months after release.
I wonder if the PS5 Pro not having a disk drive is to help their stock price. You can lock people into your storefront and charge to let you use your disk. Is the pro being sold at a loss?
Sony, like others always say the vast majority of sales are now digital. This is a way of accelerating digital sales and have people asking what’s the point of physical. Their numbers include console sales, microtransactions and PC sales. The issue with this is that PC and microatransactions are digital only.
On console you can choose between physical and digital. About a year ago Insomniac was hacked and documents, early builds and timelines were leaked. One of the documents leaked was the breakdown of digital to physical sales. It showed that outside of MLB :THE Show, every other game is bought physically more than digitally. Ghost of Tsushima is the closest to 50%, but the directors cut went down to 29%. Digital game sales still only makeup 35% of total sales.