Games

Why would Sony care about GameStop's share price?

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.

PC is cheaper because nobody has a monopoly on digital games so stores need to run sales to attract customers.

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.