Does anyone realise that sony pricing the ps5 digital edition much lower than the disk drive version would be shooting themselves in the foot?

[oali24]

I think that sony will only price the ps5 digital edition only slightly lower than the disc drive version because if they discount more it will basically betraying the optical disc business that sony owns, its a not insignificant revenue stream for sony and they would probably still want to incentivise that unless sony doesn't press their own discs for the playstation which I would have a hard time imagining or they just don't care about the optical disc business.

[lewdicrous]

People still want physical disks because, and not limited to, collections, reselling (unless they did something different), etc.

Having a digital edition still means that people need to buy the games.

[oali24]

Just now, BlueScope819 said:

It's not like they care that much about the 2$ profit they make from making their own disc drive. The real reason why it's different in price is that they have full control over what games you play on it and they get a cut.

no you misunderstand, I'm talking about the discs, the blu rays.

[oali24]

Just now, lewdicrous said:

People still want physical disks.

Having a digital edition still means that people need to buy the games.

I don't think pirated ps5 discs are going to become a problem anytime soon, and once its cracked it won't matter if people get their cracks by disc or by download.

[Enderman]

2 minutes ago, oali24 said:

no you misunderstand, I'm talking about the discs, the blu rays.

Well for the 1% of people that still use blu rays they probably already own a blu ray player or can just buy a standalone one.

 

The amount of money you save by not integrating a disk player into a console is huge.

Also, look at how many people have disk drives in their PCs these days, almost 0.

[Hackentosher]

20 minutes ago, oali24 said:

 basically betraying the optical disc business that sony owns, its a not insignificant revenue stream for sony and they would probably still want to incentivise 

press X to doubt. The actual plastic disc costs nothing, the money is all in the content. Also, @Enderman is right that fewer and fewer people use disks these days with the rise of streaming and Sony is probably saving a ton of money by not incorporating complicated mechanical systems in the digital edition of the PS5.

 

edit: I just did some reading and some math. According to this article, Sony will be making roughly 6 million PS5s for the launch. Let's assume 60% of those will be digital only, so 3.6 million units. Now looking at Newegg's page of bluray readers, we can see they're expensive units, but I'd guess they cost maybe $30 a unit at scale. So 3.6m * $30 =$108m in savings by not including a disk drive. That's pretty significant if you ask me.

[oali24]

13 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Well for the 1% of people that still use blu rays they probably already own a blu ray player or can just buy a standalone one.

 

The amount of money you save by not integrating a disk player into a console is huge.

Also, look at how many people have disk drives in their PCs these days, almost 0.

I have a blu ray disc drive, and I cared about it to the point I cut a whole in the front of my pc today so I could see the green activity led.

[Sorenson]

14 minutes ago, oali24 said:

I think that sony will only price the ps5 digital edition only slightly lower than the disc drive version because if they discount more it will basically betraying the optical disc business that sony owns, its a not insignificant revenue stream for sony and they would probably still want to incentivise that unless sony doesn't press their own discs for the playstation which I would have a hard time imagining or they just don't care about the optical disc business.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/297533/sony-sales-worldwide-by-business-segment/

"disk drives" don't even make up their own segment. This would be like ford not making a hybrid car because it might hurt their gas engine cars. 

[Enderman]

Just now, oali24 said:

I have a blu ray disc drive, and I cared about it to the point I cut a whole in the front of my pc today so I could see the green activity led.

Congrats you're part of the 0.001%.

 

As oppposed to the other 99.999% who use consoles and PCs with digital media because it's the 21st century.

[Vishera]

19 minutes ago, oali24 said:

I don't think pirated ps5 discs are going to become a problem anytime soon, and once its cracked it won't matter if people get their cracks by disc or by download.

 

As someone who is active in the Playstation hacking scene i can say that Sony really really hate hacked consoles,

They are still patching the Playstation 3 14 years after it's release,those patches are all about making it difficult to hack your own console that you bought,

Is the console really yours if you can't do whatever you want with it?...

Sony learned from the PS3 and made it really difficult to hack the Playstation 4,the only way i know to hack those consoles is by exploiting the JavaScript in the browser to inject a payload to the console via a web page that you setup.

The Playstation 5 will have JavaScript in it's browser no doubt,since JavaScript is heavily used all around the web so that can be exploited.

[oali24]

3 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Congrats you're part of the 0.001%.

 

As oppposed to the other 99.999% who use consoles and PCs with digital media because it's the 21st century.

USB drives and SD cards suck because they're so small you keep losing them, I can never keep an SD card or USB for more than like a few days, I've basically never lost a disc, and optical discs are still very cost effective, they are so much cheaper for storing small files than flash storage and if you're not storing a lot an expensive 1tb hard drive isn't as cost affective if its not going to be filled irrespective of the cost/gb. Optical still absolutely have a very important place in the 21st century 100%.

[Enderman]

5 minutes ago, oali24 said:

USB drives and SD cards suck because they're so small you keep losing them, I can never keep an SD card or USB for more than like a few days, I've basically never lost a disc, and optical discs are still very cost effective, they are so much cheaper for storing small files than flash storage and if you're not storing a lot an expensive 1tb hard drive isn't as cost affective if its not going to be filled irrespective of the cost/gb. Optical still absolutely have a very important place in the 21st century 100%.

Well if you are organized and know where you put your stuff like everyone else you wouldn't lose your USB drives.

Maybe try cloud storage if you're having problems not losing your stuff.

 

Optical disks are huge, have low capacity, and take extremely long to read and write from.

Not only that, almost no devices have disk drives these days.

Optical is a dying media, just because you use it doesn't mean the other 8 billion people do.

[oali24]

3 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Well if you are organized and know where you put your stuff like everyone else you wouldn't lose your USB drives.

Maybe try cloud storage if you're having problems not losing your stuff.

 

Optical disks are huge, have low capacity, and take extremely long to read and write from.

Not only that, almost no devices have disk drives these days.

Optical is a dying media, just because you use it doesn't mean the other 8 billion people do.

maybe in the consumer sector but it still has a place in enterprise where people care about costs above all else. And while maybe optical discs are dead in some applications, I can still buy optical discs at any stationary shop. And optical discs aren't huge they are perfectly small enough to carry around unless you're constantly moving your usbs in your pants pocket.

[Enderman]

1 minute ago, oali24 said:

maybe in the consumer sector but it still has a place in enterprise where people care about costs above all else. And while maybe optical discs are dead in some applications, I can still buy optical discs at any stationary shop. And optical discs aren't huge they are perfectly small enough to carry around unless you're constantly moving your usbs in your pants pocket.

In enterprise they use tape storage, not CDs.

And yes they are huge, do you just tie your CDs to your keychain and walk around like that? lol

[oali24]

18 minutes ago, Enderman said:

In enterprise they use tape storage, not CDs.

And yes they are huge, do you just tie your CDs to your keychain and walk around like that? lol

That isn't huge though, maybe my opinion is skewed by having two crt monitors, but just because you can attach it to a keychain doesn't mean its "huge" like unless you're taking about laserdiscs or something (which to be clear are actually obsolete), whenever I have needed to take a disc to school I just put it in my schoolbag which okay isn't practical for people who aren't students but still, they almost fit in the palm of the hand.

[PlayStation 2]

This thread fucking hurts.

Sony is making a full digital PS5 to basically lock off used game sales for those consoles. That being said, Sony does fairly good deals for games and has sales quite often, so I guess it's a "choose your poison" situation.

[Parideboy]

You're implying that everyone that buys a PS5 with the optical drive watches BlueRays. I know maybe 3 people that bought a BlueRay, none of which regularly.

 

The probably buy it because

1. They don't have a steady online connection or don't have a fast one at all
2. They like to have the disk for the collection standpoint
3. They just hate the fact that they don't 'own' what the buy, but instead they're given a digital copy that can be pulled by Sony anytime (when the support for that console ends)
4. The used market

 

Certainly not because of BlueRay itself.

10 minutes ago, oali24 said:

USB drives and SD cards suck because they're so small you keep losing them

I've literally never lost a usb stick or a memory card. Maybe because I have a handful of them, instead of a pile of disks.

10 minutes ago, oali24 said:

they are so much cheaper for storing small files than flash storage

If you store a .doc file per 16Gb usb drive, then you're absolutely right

4 minutes ago, Enderman said:

if you're not storing a lot an expensive 1tb hard drive isn't as cost affective if its not going to be filled irrespective of the cost/gb

We're talking BlueRays here, not filling a 1tb drive is a joke.

One movie per hard drive, I guess

11 minutes ago, oali24 said:

Optical still absolutely have a very important place in the 21st century 100%.

Absolutely not. In a world where we are on the verge to finally ditch mechanical hard drives, still considering a spinning media that doesn't have a clear advantage (cheap, durable for tape and convenient and affordable for HDDs) is pointless.

 

I can't plug a cd in my phone, in a printer, or in laptops (yes, laptops don't have cd drives this days). It's slow, not convenient.

 

Cds took off because they were convenient back in the day. Everything had a cd drive where you could pop your cd in.

4 minutes ago, oali24 said:

maybe in the consumer sector but it still has a place in enterprise where people care about costs above all else.

I don't know what enterprises you've been working with. I work in IT, and I've literally seen 0 optical media whatsoever.

It's either tape (I've never personally seen it, I would love to), HDDs dumped in a server rack somewhere, flash storage in all its flavors.

8 minutes ago, oali24 said:

I can still buy optical discs at any stationary shop.

As you can buy USB drives, maybe not SD cards.

10 minutes ago, oali24 said:

I have needed to take a disc to school

It's been... 3 years since I finished school. Have never brought or have seen someone bringing a cd to school.

Ironically tho, I used floppy disks back in elementary school, but I switched to USB flash drives soon enough. 

[SteveGrabowski0]

Meh physical media is dying off. But an all-digital edition console means you can't borrow games, you can't buy used games, you can't rent games, and you can't play Gamestop, Walmart, Best Buy, Amazon, Newegg, Target off each other to pay as little as possible for the game you want. You have to buy straight from PSN. And Sony doesn't have to share a cut of any of the money you spent with the retailer when you buy on PSN instead. They surely figure the gain in profits from selling digitally will more than offset the losses they will incur from pushing discs further into irrelevance or they wouldn't put out a digital console. Not only is the MSRP for games going up to $70, but actual sale prices will be going up too by more than that $10 added on when there is no competition with PSN for those who buy the digital edition of the console. PSN game prices are usually the same or worse than physical prices unless the game is say a year old or more. At that point sometimes you'll find the game cheaper on PSN when they're running a good sale.

[Monkey Dust]

Also consoles tend to be stingy with drive space, and games aren't getting smaller. If you don't have a fast internet connection, or horror of horrors a data cap (I believe this still exist in parts of the world), installing off a disk is less painful than a full download (large patches a given these days). And if you have large collection you have to keep uninstalling and reinstalling that will further push you towards disks.

 

Also physical media protects you from having loved games deleted, or more commonly the music track removed as the licence expired.

[oali24]

9 hours ago, Parideboy said:

It's been... 3 years since I finished school. Have never brought or have seen someone bringing a cd to school.

Ironically tho, I used floppy disks back in elementary school, but I switched to USB flash drives soon enough

Everyone at school thought I was weird for bringing a doc file on a cd when I could have just uploaded it to google drive. I just really hate google docs, and to be fair the only reason I didn't use a usb was that I just really like optical media, its so much more fun to burn a disc and hear the drive spin than just drag it to a usb. They didn't even have an optical drive on the laptops and I had to go to the computer lab desktops just to use it.

[oali24]

10 hours ago, Parideboy said:

I don't know what enterprises you've been working with. I work in IT, and I've literally seen 0 optical media whatsoever.

It's either tape (I've never personally seen it, I would love to), HDDs dumped in a server rack somewhere, flash storage in all its flavors.

My bad, I meant to say IT departments in places like schools or small businesses where people might have more legacy devices that have more of a need for optical media such as computers that can't boot off of usb. I've actually seen the tape machines they couldn't take out the tapes though because they were spooling I think they said.

[pythonmegapixel]

How is the revenue stream from digital games different for sony than the revenue stream for physical media?

[Ertman]

15 hours ago, pythonmegapixel said:

How is the revenue stream from digital games different for sony than the revenue stream for physical media?

It’s larger. They have more control.
 

The games generally go for about the same price (sales can be exceptions) and don’t have to share with retailers.

 

In a digital only market, they can also extract more profit by forcing everyone to buy games from them by eliminating the used market.

[pythonmegapixel]

3 hours ago, Ertman said:

It’s larger. They have more control.
 

The games generally go for about the same price (sales can be exceptions) and don’t have to share with retailers.

 

In a digital only market, they can also extract more profit by forcing everyone to buy games from them by eliminating the used market.

Which should be good for Sony.

 

The point I am trying to make is I don't agree with OP's assertion that selling the digital PS cheaper is going to hurt their market share or cause them to lose revenue from game sales.

[oali24]

42 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

Which should be good for Sony.

 

The point I am trying to make is I don't agree with OP's assertion that selling the digital PS cheaper is going to hurt their market share or cause them to lose revenue from game sales.

That wasn't my point, sony produces discs, they would want to incentivise publishers to get more discs pressed.