[ryandrake]

Gamers are notorious for accepting whatever abuse game companies and studios want to inflict, and then keep buying and buying. All the horrible anti-consumer technologies and business practices from DRM to games that are released unfinished, to kernel-level anti-cheats and rootkits, all are routinely done with video games because the industry knows gamers are fanatics and will put up with anything.

If gamers want to stop this, they need to stop rewarding these companies with their money.

99% of gamers who are mad about physical disk distribution going away will still buy the digitally distributed games.

[somenameforme]

The whole point is that they aren't accepting it. In terms of sales PS2 > PS4 > PS5. That alone is already a big issue but it becomes just comically bad when you consider that the world population is about 33% larger than during the PS2 era, gaming has become completely normalized, and that the competition in modern times is mediocre.

[IanCal]

Have profits gone down?

[chocochunks]

No, but they're also monetizing a bunch of extra ways that they weren't in the past. In the PS2 era, Sony made money from the cut of physical games and accessories and maybe the console itself if it was purchased far enough into the console lifespan. These days they have online subs, cuts of DLC and microtransactions plus all the other stuff they had previously. And they get bigger cuts for DLC, microtransactions and digital games since they are the (only) retailer.

[irishcoffee]

IIRC, the PS2 was sold at a loss, most of the profits came from accessories like controllers and memory cards. I worked at circuit city at the time which is why I remember this. The employee discount (at cost, essentially) did not exist for the console. I was irritated so I did some digging and that was what I had found.

Nope, no sources. That was like… 2 lifetimes ago.

[chocochunks]

The first few years. By the end it was supposedly profitable for Sony.

[somenameforme]

The answer to that has to come with some asterisks. Sony's statements on this issue are driven by accounting that defines generations solely by date (so PS4 profits after the PS5 launches count as PS5 gen profits) and are not inflation adjusted. There's also currency issues in play that further distort the picture. The yen just in the past 5 years has tumbled like 50% which is awesome for exports as that just bumps up your profits so long as your costs are more regional, but can be quite misleading. If you say profits jumped a bunch, you'd think you're doing something great - not just reporting currency fluctuations by proxy.

Beyond that, I think the real question is would they be earning more by selling 300million+ units to a growing userbase with a positive relationship than they are selling 100 million units to a shrinking userbase who they have an increasingly adversarial relationship with? And I think it's hard to see the answer to that question being no. But that again requires taking a step back to see the forest through all those trees.

Like here, ending physical disc production is obviously going to give them a short-term boon in profit as they kill off the used game market. But longer term? It's certainly going to further erode their playerbase. The short-term profit boost will be measurable next quarter, whereas the longer-term consequences will appear in the order of years. So you get a short-term boost and then longer term are left wondering where all your players went to. Then they invariably concoct nonsensical explanations that always look for any reason outside of their own actions to explain the decline. Like at one time the fable is that people were giving up consoles for mobile.