Time ago they said games would be cheaper being digital than the retailer disc edition.
These days usually you can find the disc version quite cheaper than digital edition and something like the ultimate edition get a figure and some other goodies (yep ugly as hell but is something you don’t get on digital ultimate edition at the same price).
Publishers got the retailers margin benefits with no improvement for the costumers. It’s the same fight as always.
Games wouldn’t be cheaper without Steam. They just want that margin to please investors and high executives salaries.
I thinks it's been like this since at least maybe 2018 or so. Where before it would be cheaper to buy digital games and later on physical would get cheaper. Now a days it's way cheaper to buy a physical copy, especially since they tend to go on sale more often now (a lot of price drops).
Is it possible it's like this since there are relatively more game releases now a days with way more publishers than there have ever been releasing new stuff and stores just not having enough space for it all.
It is possible that before physical used to be more popular than digital and they use to get an X amount of copies and because of how popular titles were, that stores were able to sell a Y amount of games constantly. But that's no longer the case and they are maybe only selling 1/2 of Y amount nowadays (or some other value) and because there is going to be even more releases that they have to just drop the price down in order to get people to buy the X amount of copies that they still have in stock.
I'm looking at Wario64 deals right now and some physical copies of games are going for $20-30 USD about less than a year after they release. Meanwhile on PC some of these games will be $25-30 at the cheapest now adays. At least on PC it's no longer a race to the bottom like it used to be years ago.
By the way speaking of racing to the bottom. I'm curious as to what Nintendo will do with the eShop for Switch 2. If Nintendo decides to do BC that will be a double edge sword. On one hand you get to access all of your Switch games both physical and digital which is good for people (I doubt you will get any gains for a lot of games and that they will be capped at something. You will likely get a constant 30fps on a lot more games), how ever because of that it will likely limiting people buying a bunch of new games since there is no need since you can still play your old games (after the Switch released and after people played Breath of the Wild, there was nothing else on the Switch if you were an indie dev that was making a Wii U title and you didn't abandon Nintendo then you got rewarded with the Switch and your game potentially selling hundreds of thousands of copies).
The biggest issue with Switch 2 will be the eShop. Since 2017 Nintendo has hardly made any changes to the eShop!!!! They at most, changed an eShop policy of how low you can price your game. I doubt expect Nintendo to be spending million of dollars on redesigning the new eShop to be more like Steam were it recommends games to users based of that users prefers and stuff like that. How ever if you just keep adding more stuff to the eShop without trying to make it easier to browses though the available games then Indies just aren't going to sell that well and the main way you will be able to get your game noticed is through a Nindie Direct.
I really don't like game subscriptions.
Buy your Indie games.
Does Humble Bundle count as a game subscription?
