Anyone have insights on how physical copies totally died out on the PC market, but are still going strong on Console? I remember buying civ 5 on physical disc back in middle school, and even then the guy at GameStop was all surprised to be selling a hard copy of a PC game.all this time later, and you can still buy pretty much Amy major game on hard disc for consoles. Why?
My two cents:
PC has been able to install the entire game for a long time. Having to swap disks soley to prove ownership was always annoying. With installation, systems.were needed pt prevent multiple installs, and activation made the second hand market difficult. There was plenty of resistance to Steam when it came out, but the convenience won.
To contrast, consoles had a long history of the cartridge or disk being the only thing and they were portable. That allowed trading, lending, and selling the physical item to be part of the experience for longer. They also didn’t have the hard disk space or (good) internet connection like PCs did. Like early Steam, previous attempts at consoles without support for physical copies were unpopular. It seems convenience is winning again.
Consoles seem to be following the same path as PC, just a decade or two later.
I want to note that Starfield is digital-only and $70 priced (as opposed to Alan Wake 2 trying to at least give a legitimate reason and lower price), so we’re at the point where physical media is finally disappearing on console. The next gen likely won’t have disc variants, period, and I imagine we’ll see stores start to swap out physical games for the digital game giftcards. My local Super Target has already replaced the budget games section with magazines of all things and the game’s section is pretty barren outside of the endcap with the latest releases.
PC physical copies hasn’t totally died. You can still buy boxed editions and collectors editions for certain games.
And digital copies for consoles is quite popular too now. In fact, for many less popular games, not physical version is available.
so, not sure your observations universal.
regardless though, I’d guess it’s because the console market has to contend with the fact that many console owners won’t have internet on their consoles.
My personal theory is that different game publishers wanted to push their own digital storefront, but that only works for PCs. Valve was able to release Steam on PC, but I can’t imagine it’ll ever make its way to PlayStation or Xbox.
I think what happened is a lot of PC games started becoming blank disks with install software for the publisher’s storefront with a download code for the game. Then eventually when everyone had the storefront installed, they no longer had to ship anything.
This is not feasible for console since no additional storefronts (beyond Sony’s and Microsoft’s) will likely ever be allowed.
So while it saves a bit of money to ship a download code in a box, it doesn’t actually net them the benefit of getting you on the publisher’s ecosystem; so it usually isn’t worth the bad publicity to not ship a disk.
On a personal note, I love owning things physically. If the market ever moved fully to digital purchases only, I’d likely become a “retro” gamer exclusively.