DunDunDunpachi
Patient MembeR
Poll included for those who wish to weigh in with a vote.
Game Pass hands out digital games to subscribers, and also offers discounted digital copies to subscribers who want to own a copy. Physical, however, is left in the cold. You're paying full price.
Microsoft is aggressively changing the price structure of the industry, making it too expensive for The Other Guys to sell their games at a profitable price. But moreso than buying full-priced games, this is a move against retail games. Microsoft wants to set the price and dole out the ownership. They want you on Game Pass moreso than they want you on Xbox hardware, and they've repeated this multiple times. The unspoken desire is to get you on a digital collection instead of printing those pesky videogame discs so that you can own the game yourself. Pushing everything into GaaS format makes physical discs even less desirable.
I could be way off, but I don't foresee Xbox series S/X games holding on to a lot of shelf space after the next 2 years. Physical games won't sell because it will be the most expensive way to buy games on the Xbox. Low physical sales means publishers and retailers are less likely to put out more physical copies for future games, and used-game shops are not as likely to devote shelf space to them. Give it a few years and you'll have a lot of Xboxes sold but not a lot of physical games out in the wild to be sold back to secondhand stores.
I don't necessarily think this is a bad way to go about it, by the way. It's better to attract your customers to something else instead of cutting it out and dealing with their anger.
Game Pass hands out digital games to subscribers, and also offers discounted digital copies to subscribers who want to own a copy. Physical, however, is left in the cold. You're paying full price.
Microsoft is aggressively changing the price structure of the industry, making it too expensive for The Other Guys to sell their games at a profitable price. But moreso than buying full-priced games, this is a move against retail games. Microsoft wants to set the price and dole out the ownership. They want you on Game Pass moreso than they want you on Xbox hardware, and they've repeated this multiple times. The unspoken desire is to get you on a digital collection instead of printing those pesky videogame discs so that you can own the game yourself. Pushing everything into GaaS format makes physical discs even less desirable.
I could be way off, but I don't foresee Xbox series S/X games holding on to a lot of shelf space after the next 2 years. Physical games won't sell because it will be the most expensive way to buy games on the Xbox. Low physical sales means publishers and retailers are less likely to put out more physical copies for future games, and used-game shops are not as likely to devote shelf space to them. Give it a few years and you'll have a lot of Xboxes sold but not a lot of physical games out in the wild to be sold back to secondhand stores.
I don't necessarily think this is a bad way to go about it, by the way. It's better to attract your customers to something else instead of cutting it out and dealing with their anger.
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