I hope I am wrong but I see the next generation as completely discless specially if this current generation discless versions sold good enough. The only exception could be Nintendo.
Of course they might require some deals with stores or just sell themselves the consoles online… Because the stores want to sell games, they might still sell peripherals and redeemable cards for money or maybe CD keys… No idea tough, but if the benefits fall they might say “Nah I am not selling your console if games aren’t sold here”.
What needs to happen is regulation. Pro-consumer governing bodies (which don’t exist in the US, but the EU has been on a roll) mandating the right to transfer a digital license.
As for the stores, Xbox offers GameStop a small percentage of the revenue from every digital game purchased on a console sold by GameStop. That feels like a healthy compromise for an all-digital business model.
mandating the right to transfer a digital license.
Even for the EU that is not an easy thing to deal with in practice. First they would need to outright ban practices where you rent your license for an unspecified time instead of owning it. (this is how it is with everything in mobile app stores, Steam, Epic etc…)
And transfer of digital licenses in general is a very hard nut to crack. How do you simply prove who the license owner is? What about accounts being tied to licenses? (Imagine the EU asking software companies that all products above the value of €25 must be sold with a hardware key to run them & if the key is damaged they are mandated to replace it at the manufacturing cost of said hardware key, or use a central EU ran entity to handle these keys that the companies would need to buy from them. Pretty far fetched, isn’t it?)
Decades of lenient legislation made all this night impossible untangle…
I hope I am wrong but I see the next generation as completely discless specially if this current generation discless versions sold good enough. The only exception could be Nintendo.
Of course they might require some deals with stores or just sell themselves the consoles online… Because the stores want to sell games, they might still sell peripherals and redeemable cards for money or maybe CD keys… No idea tough, but if the benefits fall they might say “Nah I am not selling your console if games aren’t sold here”.
What needs to happen is regulation. Pro-consumer governing bodies (which don’t exist in the US, but the EU has been on a roll) mandating the right to transfer a digital license.
As for the stores, Xbox offers GameStop a small percentage of the revenue from every digital game purchased on a console sold by GameStop. That feels like a healthy compromise for an all-digital business model.
Even for the EU that is not an easy thing to deal with in practice. First they would need to outright ban practices where you rent your license for an unspecified time instead of owning it. (this is how it is with everything in mobile app stores, Steam, Epic etc…) And transfer of digital licenses in general is a very hard nut to crack. How do you simply prove who the license owner is? What about accounts being tied to licenses? (Imagine the EU asking software companies that all products above the value of €25 must be sold with a hardware key to run them & if the key is damaged they are mandated to replace it at the manufacturing cost of said hardware key, or use a central EU ran entity to handle these keys that the companies would need to buy from them. Pretty far fetched, isn’t it?)
Decades of lenient legislation made all this night impossible untangle…
I mean - if the button says “buy” or “purchase” it’s not renting a license, no matter what the fine print in the terms say.
That’s at least how it should be.
Somehow the law ignores the giant flashing “Buy!” button but is super concerned about the fine print in 6pt font nobody reads.