people buy physical games when its an option. take god of war ragnarok where more than 60% of copies sold were on disk. its a totally different situation from niche products with no existing supply chain.
sony numbers are distorted because most third party games are digital only, and the average players preference for physical is not so strong that they wouldnt buy the game at all. its also not counting sharing or second hand sales so the number of players on physical is even higher.
I have five PS5 discs from around launch. Gifts. It is such a pain finding them and putting them in only to download a patch anyway. I’d sell them but I don’t want to perpetuate them as a thing so I’ll likely just throw them away.
Does that mean capitalism is not an efficient system to meet the needs of well-informed consumers? Why am I being lumped in with an 8 year old who asks their parents to buy them an online game? There should be a market for physical media and devices with physical buttons if people exist who want them. These companies won’t work on anything that doesn’t bring them a gazillion dollars, so billion/million dollar ventures never get off the ground.
Rule of thumb: when a fanboy asserts that any person holding an alternative view is defective, you should immediately abandon the fanboy's position and adopt the alternative view. It's heuristically more likely to be correct, and it gets you out of an odious fan club.
Case in point: China proceeded through stages of development more efficiently than any western nation. Case in point: South Korea incubated its industry in a command economy.
Throw the USSR in there as well. Central planning allowed them to leap from an agrarian society to launching Sputnik and putting the first human in space, which spooked us into kickstarting the space race. It wasn’t market incentives that did that.
The USSR performed _somewhat_ well, but i wouldn't say it clearly outperformed the west given the whole "collapse" thing. I could argue the point, but only weakly.
It's more illuminating to pick the two exemplars, America and China, because they have many parallels
It outperformed the west in some things, notably not computing (which sealed its fate). I agree though. But I think there’s also something to be said about the way in which the experiment ended. Compared to the bloody, violent disintegration of most historical superpowers, the dissolution of the USSR was a remarkably swift, self-inflicted, and low-violence event.
Take a breath, you’re having a total knee-jerk reaction. What statistic?
So out of thousands of years of human history, we somehow stumbled onto the absolute final, perfect economic system 250 years ago with zero room for upgrade? Makes total sense /s.
I’m sure there were those who said feudalism/mercantilism were the most efficient systems ever and we don’t need capitalism. Even Marx was a fan of capitalism, he viewed it as a revolutionary stepping stone towards a more efficient system and praised it for lifting feudal subjects out of poverty, and the massive productivity gains it produced. That’s not what’s being argued here.
> "The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together."
sony numbers are distorted because most third party games are digital only, and the average players preference for physical is not so strong that they wouldnt buy the game at all. its also not counting sharing or second hand sales so the number of players on physical is even higher.