An All-Digital Future Is Bad News for Console Gamers, Here’s Why
Most consoles ship with a disc drive, and you can buy physical games, but digital games are becoming the norm. This could spell trouble for console gamer’s wallets, but there may be a few ways to avoid that future.
Before getting to the console side of things, a common argument in the gaming community is that PC gaming has gone fully-digital years ago and has mostly been perfectly fine. It’s true that you can’t really buy games on disc for PC anymore, and virtually no computer comes with an optical drive as standard.
However, the crucial difference is that PC games are sold on an open market. PC gamers have a choice of several digital gaming platforms. Game developers can sell their games directly without using any third-party storefront. For example, Blizzard sells their games using its own launcher and store.
Price competition is maintained on PC because no one has complete control over video game pricing. If any one vendor inflates their prices, another will undercut them. That’s a very different context than the “walled garden” video game market model that consoles use.
When you buy a console that can only play digital games, you hand 100% of the pricing control to the console platform owner. Unlike a PC, you can’t buy your digital console games from anyone but the big three console brands Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft.
These companies still sell digital game codes and account vouchers to retailers. These retailers have some wiggle room to cut prices using their own margin, but once physical games no longer exist for future consoles, there’s no reason companies can’t stop selling digital codes to third-party stores. In fact, Sony already stopped selling digital game codes to physical retailers in 2019.
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