Sony never doing away with retail

Doesn’t seem true, does it?

In the UK, major retailers such as Game and Gamestation pull a huge amount of profit from pre-owned games. The publishers get no money from these sales. With the huge leap in direct-download and all the DRM involved in that (which makes it impossible to resell your game, hence increasing publisher profit) you would have thought Sony would want to get up close and cosy with the idea.

What I am trying to say is, if they are not going to do away with retail, then the content model is going to change. Think episodic content. Think paying for extra stuff. The game you buy in retail spaces is only the base; they will make the money in selling you the extra content which you used to get anyway when buying a game.

This doesnt include the huge wads of cash people now pay for subscriptions to games like WoW now, though!

This entry was posted on April 12, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Gaming, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Sony never doing away with retail”

  1. Robert Says:
    April 13, 2007 at 6:12 pm

    See - here am I leaving a comment. I have heard that Sony are holding back a lot of material in the next Grand Turismo and asking people to buy new cars and courses from their online site. The number of cars will be much less in this game than number 2 - you will need to download the rest.

    On the otherhand Rockstar have said on top of the full GTA4 game there will be extra episodic content for Xbox 360 owners (wonder why not PS3?) which doesnt mean you wont get a full games experience but rather some bells and whistles. This for me is the way they should be going. Withholding stuff from a game which could be easily included and has been before for the sake of downloading is going to put a lot of people off where as with GTA its almost an added extra.

  2. Colin Riley Says:
    April 14, 2007 at 11:30 am

    Excellent! See, it’s better to comment here to keep the discussion flowing.

    I know Microsoft seem to be going full throttle this way, just seems odd why sony are not pushing for it as much - maybe because they dont have as big a foothold as Xbox Live.

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