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Dutch consumer foundation sues Sony for overpricing digital PlayStation games
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this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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PC games don’t have an open market in the way you think.
The reason digital console games are more expensive than physical is precisely because physical console games are still a thing. Digital prices are kept high to not piss off the physical stores. If digital was cheaper then the brick and mortar stores would sell way less games. Shelf space in stores is limited and if they don’t sell enough games they rather use that space for something more profitable. As such, lowering digital prices would effectively end physical game sales.
Once you take physical sales out of the equation digital prices will drop. The fact digital PC games are so much cheaper proves this.
You don't really believe that, do you? Why would a for-profit company would ever lower the prices if it wasn't absolutely necessary?
You don’t have to believe me, just look at the price for PC games which are already digital-only.
I bought resident evil code in the box PC because it was cheaper that directly on steam.
Why would Sony care about GameStop's share price? Physical stores already are using the shelf space for more profitable things. GameStop's shelf space is like 90% not-games now, plus they're closing down tons of physical locations to focus on online sales.
Physical games still exist because they'd lose too many sales if they exclusively sold digital games. Otherwise, they'd happily stop selling physical games since they make less money for every physical game sold. Money gained from digital-only sales is less than money lost from pissed off customers not buying your console or games at all, so they keep physical games.
PC is not cheaper because there are no physical games, lol. How would less options and less competition lower prices? PC is cheaper because nobody has a monopoly on digital games so stores need to run sales to attract customers. This article is literally about Sony restricting digital sales to their own store so they can have a monopoly and artificially raise prices.
Exactly. That's why I personally don't mind buying digital games on PC, because the PC is an open platform. If Valve decides to drop the ball and sell every game for double the price or something, I can still get and copy games via other means on my Steam Deck. If Sony decides they double the price, you're out of luck.
That’s not how it works at all. Valve doesn’t set the prices in their store, the publishers do. Valve just takes a cut of whatever the publisher decides to charge. If a publisher for a game decides to double the price for a game, why would they do so only on Steam and not on every other store that game is sold?
It was just an example. If they only allow publishers to publish racing games from now on or whatever, you have a choice to run other software on your hardware. A console is locked down, it's a brick if the manufacturer want it to be.
They don’t. They care about their games being on the shelves because that’s where grandma is going to pick up a game for Billy’s birthday.
PSN has sales just like the stores for PC games, there’s no difference there. The difference is that the non-sale price on PC is lower.
You also seem to be under the impression that digital stores work like physical ones, where the store buys their wares from a distributer and then decides at what price to sell it to the consumer, maybe even at a loss when they want to clear inventory. This is not how digital sales work.
Digital stores operate according to what’s known as the ‘agency model’. They don’t set the price of the products, they just take a cut of the sale. The prices are set by the publishers. Even sales work that way, the stores don’t determine the sales price, instead they go to the publishers and say “we’re going to do a sales event, want to join in?”.
For each individual game, the publisher of that game has a monopoly. There is absolutely zero competition between stores on individual games because they do not have any control over the pricing of games in the first place. The publisher set the price for each store.