Consoles Aren't Going Anywhere, Says GameStop

[emeraldrafael]

This should be an obvious statement. This should be like when people say PC gaming is dying and everyone jumps up to defend it.

Consoles arent going to go anywhere quickly, they'll still get made. eventually, yes, they'll be gone, but then again, so will PCs at that point. But they'll still be around.

 

[CBanana]

For the consumer, this should mean lower prices for games. It would definitely mean higher accessibility.

Fix'd.

Sorry if I seem pessimistic, but... More money for developer + same demand (or even slightly less demand) = more profit coming in... So, from a business perspective... If I can sell a digital copy for the same price as a hard disk copy, and sell the same number of said copy. Also note that I'd be paying a small fee for the broadband usage for download compared to the amount needed for all those hazardous chemicals used to manufacture CDs, and wouldn't have to go through a middleman like gamestop or gamecrazy...

Why would I lower prices?

The supply and demand curve can work in a way to make lower prices more profitable. Usually as price decreases, demand increases.

Let's say very simplistically that it costs a publisher $20 to sell a game at retail and $10 to sell a game via download. Also let's say that 10,000 people will buy the game at $60 while 13,000 will buy the game at $50. At a retail store, the game costing $60 makes you ($60-$20)x10,000 or $400,000 while the game costing $50 makes you ($50-$20)x13,000 or $390,000. With direct download the game costing $60 makes you ($60-$10)x10,000 or $500,000 while the game costing $50 makes you ($50-$10)x$13,000 or $520,000.

While it may not seem like a very large difference proportionally, you can still see that when your cost per unit goes down, it's less risky and can sometimes can be more profitable to lower the price per unit.

 

[TokenRupee]

Cloud gaming sucks anyway, I'd rather have a new Playstation.

Especially since you don't own the game and have to keep paying to have access to it.

Exactly, as much as people want to say that you don't own your games on Steam, you actually download it. The game exists as accessible, manipulated data. With the cloud service, I feel like I'm paying for access to the one and only copy of the game on their server. Mind you I don't actually believe that they use 1 copy of 1 game between thousands of users, but that's how it feels, especially when you consider how laggy the damn thing is.

Besides, what happens if you stop subscribing or the internet goes out? I usually resort to playing single-player games then, but I guess I'm SOL if all my games are on Onlive or something.

 

[TokenRupee]

Cloud gaming sucks anyway, I'd rather have a new Playstation.

Especially since you don't own the game and have to keep paying to have access to it.

Exactly, as much as people want to say that you don't own your games on Steam, you actually download it. The game exists as accessible, manipulated data. With the cloud service, I feel like I'm paying for access to the one and only copy of the game on their server. Mind you I don't actually believe that they use 1 copy of 1 game between thousands of users, but that's how it feels, especially when you consider how laggy the damn thing is.

Besides, what happens if you stop subscribing or the internet goes out? I usually resort to playing single-player games then, but I guess I'm SOL if all my games are on Onlive or something.

This can happen on PCs with steam, this is why whenever I am not looking at all of the sexy sales that are up I switch it to offline mode, then I can game worry free about internet avalability

The main difference being that Steam has an offline mode and you can still play all your games. You're screwed if Onlive's servers crap out though.

 

[spartan231490]

used games, physical copies, and consoles will be around for a long while yet. Looking at your collection of games on the wall is much more satisfying than looking through a digital library of the titles. Used games are still cheaper, even if some publishers are doing code shit, many games are sold only for single player anyway, and used games become much cheaper after the games been out a few weeks or months.

 

[Dusk17]

Did I miss something, why does everyone hate Gamestop?