Sony Gives Its Disc-Loving Customers A Giant Middle Finger
from the but-it's-a-cautious-middle-finger dept
Just a few weeks ago, Sony announced that it would stop producing games on physical media starting in 2028 and a very loud portion of Sony’s customers lost their freaking minds. And, in this writer’s opinion, for very good reason. Having no physical media option for your games is going to make game preservation efforts nearly impossible. It makes gaming companies coming up with physical collectables to ship with their games a much more complicated prospect. And, as Sony itself likes to remind us over and over again, a game purchased digitally isn’t a game purchased at all, but rather a limited and temporary license to play a game for however long the publisher decides it should be available.
Given the backlash, it’s not all that surprising that some groups out there are attempting to organize against PlayStation usage blackouts in protest, though we’ll see how far they actually get with that. Given that Sony itself seems to be willing to give those angry customers a giant middle finger through it all, it’s hard to see it having much effect.
“There are various reasons we made this decision, the biggest being that the digitalization of content overall has been progressing, that’s the big factor,” Sony chief financial officer Lin Tao said through an interpreter during a Q&A on July 31. “It’s not just for PlayStation, but for all kinds of content, digitalization is progressing.”
“And so when we think about the future—and we put in a lot of thought and time, and we cautiously considered this—and we came to this conclusion, and we’re going to cautiously move this forward. And to this decision, we have received various opinions and people have strong views, and we understand that the community has put forth those views to us. Games are loved by many people. It’s a form of entertainment that’s loved by people, and it’s connected to people’s fond memories in many cases. And so we understand those emotions. We want to consider that. And in the future digital ecosystem, how do we engage the gamers is something that we would like to continue to explore.”
Now, I want to be clear that the word salad above is also the result of a translation. I have no idea how or if this would read any differently in its original language. But I sure would hope it would, because all those words above say absolutely nothing other than, “Yeah, we don’t care, we’re doing this anyway.”
It didn’t get any better when questions were asked from an investment standpoint. One analyst asked the perfectly reasonable question of what this was going to do to the downstream gaming retailers and Sony’s relationship with them. Tau’s answer was that those retailers can still sell mostly empty boxes.
In response, Tao pointed out that publishers will still be able to ship empty boxes with codes inside to stores in markets like North America and argued that PlayStation hardware will win on affordability.
“About the retailers, there are regional characteristics, and for each regional partner, we try to have a thorough dialogue so that we can end up in a win-win situation,” the CFO said.
No concern for preservation efforts. No concern for the 20% or so customers who still want to buy physical media. No concern for any brick and mortar retail partners and what will happen to them.
It appears Sony is going to listen to anyone but its own customers on this one.
Filed Under: backlash, discs, ownership, physical discs, playstation, video games
Companies: sony
Comments on “Sony Gives Its Disc-Loving Customers A Giant Middle Finger”
As if data on the disc isn’t digital.
🖕 < The only digital Sony understands or deserves.
Re:
It was the Sony of 1980 that invented digital media discs (with Philips). Arguably, Sony didn’t really go anti-consumer till they bought a movie studio in 1987. It’s doubtful that any current Sony employee has any memory of either of those events.
Of course they did — Sony loves control, even more than unearned recurring revenue, so this was inevitable.
Just another mega-corp that thinks customers exist to provide for corporations, rather than corporations existing to serve customers.
What is the overhead on physical sales ?
The expenses that disappear when Sony moves to digital, without changing the sale price.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Sony can lose more than that 20% of customers and still see a significant profit increase.
Unless Sony plans to offer stores a huge monetary share of game sales, the margins on console sales are not enough to bother keeping them on the shelves. The only thing you’ll find on game store shelves for the Playstation soon will be 3rd party peripherals (which do have a much nicer margin on them!).
I wonder though, with this shift to digital only, the console becomes just a device, there is no more proprietary encrypted disc to be read, which was the main point of a console. It’s basically gonna be just a PC with a custom OS on it. Think anyone will sue Sony to open the Playstation to alternate marketplaces anytime soon?
They’re doing this “cautiously” just like Apple “courageously” removing the headphone jack. I don’t know what’s worse, the act itself or the condescending attitude and thinking we’re dumb enough to fall for it.
This coming on the backs of them wiping out large swathes of people’s media libraries, seemingly with glee, it feels like they really have an attitude that they can treat their customers like shit and still get the sales any way. I hope the market proves them wrong, but given the way every other gamer boycott has gone, I’m not holding my breath.
Re:
” I hope the market proves them wrong, but given the way every other gamer boycott has gone, I’m not holding my breath.”
And that is precisely the problem. Gamers have never been able to organize effectively to stop this nonsense, so Sony (and every other company in the space) knows that all the complaining will never amount to anything substantial.
The irony of this is that gamers have the power in their hands to stop this nonsense, and stop it rather quickly — but they don’t have the self-discipline to give up certain games in order to make it happen. They just can’t stop buying products/services no matter how badly they’re treated by the companies they’re patronizing.
So as awful as Sony is — and I’ve removed all Sony products from the environment, even though I’m not a gamer — the fact that they’ve chosen to do this is a reflection of the complete ineptness of the gamer community. Their failure to construct and enforce an effective boycott has taught executives a lesson: they can do anything they want. Anything. And gamers will complain online and then come right back as soon as there’s some game they really want to play.
Re:
“it feels like they really have an attitude that they can treat their customers like shit and still get the sales any way.”
And as long as gamers remain obsessed with gaming, they can.
Re: Re:
Lest someone think competition will help, here’s a story from last week: Xbox’s huge outage even blocked games on disc
Re:
It’s kind of Sony’s job to attract that hatred. Just like the MPAA is there to attract the hatred that might otherwise go to the likes of Spielberg, who can now start sentences with “If it were up to me…”. Or how Ticketmaster plays the villain while Taylor Swift and Oasis get to play innocent.
The people playing the games aren’t even really Sony’s customers.
They are greatly concerned for preservation efforts. They’ve been far too successful for Sony’s taste, and need to be knocked down 2 or 3 pegs.
One thing I don’t understand in all this is.. where is Nintendo? They also have “physical” games that are just a code and sure as hell the next switch version will dump those as well..
Wanna bet Nintendo is watching Sony “taking one for the team”?
Re:
I guess you’re talking about “Game-Key cards” which Wikipedia says “contain no data on them other than a digital license for the game”. But it’d be weird to get rid of only those, when the Switch also supports “real” cards with up to 64 GB of game data.
Anyway, it seems you basically do understand where Nintendo is. They’re on the sidelines (kind of) with Microsoft, both of whom will be able to claim a lack of demand for physical media if Sony’s next system is profitable. I say “kind of” because the Game-Key Cards are already letting them test the waters: are people returning those cards in large numbers, complaining that the game wouldn’t work without Internet access or requires too much valuable storage space?
(The same goes for Xbox and Playstation discs requiring Internet downloads. I’m sure the platform operators have these numbers.)
Language is the tool to move the thoughts of one person to another.
I would argue that corpo-speak is therefore a truly universal language. Because no matter how opaque, no matter what national language it’s delivered in, once one understands its basics you then always correctly recieve the corporate thoughts being communicated:
“BLAH BLAH BLAH WE GETS DA MONEY YOUSE GETS DA SHAFT BLAH BLAH BLAH WE GETS DA MONEY YOUSE GETS DA SHAFT”
Only like 5% of sales actually involve a physical disk these days.
It’s just a lot of infrastructure that is no longer supported by economics. I don’t like it either but Sony is RIGHT.
Sorry, but this is just a windmill. The problem with Sony and discs has nothing to do with physical media, which is already laden with ham fisted DRM out the wazoo. It’s no garuntee that any disc is playable because of that problem, especially used… or at least ostensibly new.
The real problem is that the Sony platform has no meaningful competition to reach its users. Till there’s meaningful reform in competition laws along with a huge reform in copyright law in the US and elsewhere, this will remain the problem, and no amount of physical media will correct it.
Re:
Copyright is, by the way, a massive anti-competitive subsidy, which is of course why it needs to be included in the reform. Literally any unauthorized competitor to the copyright holder is likely to provide a better product. I’ll take an NTb release over a Sony one any day.
Did people think a payment to Sony would get them a regular-sized middle finger?
Im not sure how much the physical media enables preservation of the games anymore. The last few games I bought on disc had to download a bunch of content before they were playable anyway, which probably means that if those servers ever get taken offline, the game isn’t much of a game anymore.
Once more, Nintendo walks away still the clear victor and still the best video-game system in the world with the best reputation despite their anti-consumer and anti-competitive practices.
Siding with the Luddites, quite the (silly) position.