this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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You are aware, if that was significantly a problem, a dev can choose to sell a game digitally only. It already exists and some devs already do so.
I fail to see your point? Right now a dev can sell their game as digital-only, forego a bunch of distribution costs and other costs associated with a physical release, and prevent lost game sales from resales. If this was to actually happen, they could no longer prevent those lost sales.
As a gamer, there's no longer any reason to "pay" for games. You can just borrow them. Buy them used, and turn around and sell them when you're done.
because the problem you're brining up is that physical sales is devaluing a devs game because its constantly resold. If that is a significant problem, then get rid of physical sales period, but they still do it which show syou how much devs are willing to support physical sales.
Physical games degrade. They can get filthy or stop working. I'm talking about reselling digital games. If I want to play for example the last of us, I would have zero incentive to buy a new digital copy if I can buy a resold licence from someone who already finished it for a much lower price.
On top of that, digital games also don't have to deal with actually needing to transfer between buyer and seller. You don't need to meet up or send it by mail. It's an instant transaction that has a much larger pool of sellers and customers.
its also a transaction that a native game sellign service can setup to allow for a cut of profit if trade is done on the site, which could give devs a tiny bit more money. if the threat of additional aftermarket sales didnt threat when its physical, then why did devs make physical versions of the game. Theres always some room to debate what ifs, but it doesnt stop the fact that resell of physical did not stop devs from wanting to sell physical, and you can't automatically apply it to digital immediately either.
a e-tailer can choose to create an easy to buy system and then charge some % of the selling fee ala gamestop, and choose to also redistribute some of that fee to the dev if the platform wanted to get on the devs good side after obliging to said law. a lot of things can happen and its not wise to automatically assume the worst outcome.
Do you think steam and devs are going to allow the transfer of a game on their platform without their cut?
Exactly. When I sell trading cards, Steam takes their cut. I see no reason to expect that Steam and similar platforms couldn't do the same for games, and share the revenue with the publishers.
The way I expect it to work is that you'd sell the game at a fixed price and the resold license would have some limitations (e.g. no trading cards), and the publisher would make almost at much from that sale as a new sale (e.g. maybe Steam takes a smaller cut, and your discount is the difference).
Steam would likely still get paid, but there's no reason they would have to give the publisher anything.
They would if they want to keep the publisher happy. Otherwise the publisher would just see it as losing sales.