Weird take.
“We’re not worried about potentially alienating 10% of our customers. They’ll fall in line and buy digital. We have more megaman collections to pump out from 40 year old NES games on the PS6.”
They’re reassuring their investors to remain optimistic about their investments. Besides, some amount of that 10% will shift to digital, as it’s been trending that way, where they get higher profit margins, so it might come out in the wash in actuality.
So looking at the projected earnings of 190,000,000,000 yen, that means they are a-okay with losing 10%, which comes out to a missing $11,996,123 in sales.
I wish I was in a position where I could shrug off 11 million dollars.
That assumes every single disc buyer becomes a person that doesn’t ever buy capcom games. Given the margins lost on each physical sale (licensing fees, manufacturing, shipping, the retailer’s own markup), as long as half of those disc enjoyers become digital purchasers Capcom has already lost nothing.
Additionally, how many millions per year are spent on used Capcom game discs? If literally every used Capcom buyer stopped ever buying Capcom products, Capcom loses $0. If any percent of those used game buyers becomes willing to pay full price (or hell, digital on-sale price), that’s more money in Capcom’s pocket to offset losing true physical media diehards.
Margins exist on physical games, especially as a third party. Capcom probably takes home some ~$25 per $60 disc game for PS5, less for a $60 Nintendo cartridge, and $42 per $60 digital game on PS or Steam. Lose a full half of those 10% of players but turn the other half into digital buyers, you’re barely short of breaking even. Then consider how many used game buyers you turned into people that actually pay Capcom for Capcom games.
Plenty of customers buy physical because hey, at the same price why not? That doesn’t mean they’ll stop buying Zelda or GTA or Resident Evil when Capcom/Sony takes the option away or Nintendo makes the download cheaper than the physical object (as it always should have been).
“It’s worth noting the Resident Evil and Monster Hunter maker counts Game-Key card sales as digital.”
We chose to make physical releases unavailable on the most popular platforms, and, completely coincidentally, found they make up a minority of sales.
Now that’s weird. Is a ps5 disc digital because you need to download the data day one anyway? I don’t think the packing and manufacturing companies would agree with this
Game key cards (and discs for update-reliant or online-focused games) are in a weird place. The main reasons people claim to care about physical games are “preservation” and “used games” and those don’t actually overlap.
From the preservation standpoint, GCKs and discs that don’t have the whole game are both pretty shit. There’s an argument that buggy broken v1.0 is better than nothing and that’s objectively true, but neither of these things provide actual software preservation in the face of (for example) storefront closure or account banning. GCKs and all discs are useless for preservation of online games, of course: what are you doing with that Highguard or Concord disc? A further argument is that even a complete game burned to a disc that relies on DRM isn’t truly preserved as it won’t outlive the death of the DRM boxes themselves, when every Nintendo 3DS dies you’re not going to be able to play that pristine physical copy of Pokémon Moon. Used physical games themselves are also a physical product that can decay or be damaged or lost - you can’t say that a game with a million extant discs being traded around between various people is a “preserved game”.
A completely different appeal for physical games is simply the ability to resell. Your gaming budget goes a longer way if instead of spending $60 three times to play three games, you’re spending $45 three times and also selling the games for $30 after you’re done with them. You could play ten first-party single player Nintendo games legally on the Switch for $0 if you always bought used and sold the used copies for the same price you bought them for. Game-Key cards and discs for incomplete/online-only games do facilitate this perfectly, though GCKs lose all value when the CDN of the storefront closes and discs only lose most value in this situation.
Yeah, there’s 3 different lenses here. Preservation, ownership, and piracy.
It’s a bit of a hot take, but I don’t value “preservation” in the way most gamers do. I prefer it instead of not, but my lens here is as simple as “piracy will always be the true preservation mechanism”. The ability to back up your games is legal and technically that game lying on my computer is “preservation”. But preservation without distribution is gatekeeping in a way. Distribution is what ensures true preservation, but we cross into piracy.
What I do value is ownership and as you said, Game Key Cards give you all the benefits of ownership at the cost of preservation. It can theoretically be useless one day, and when that happens I see it as free game to pirate. But technically I believe even online Wii games you own can still be downloaded, despite not being able to buy on the store anymore. So we’ll see how long that lasts.
Piracy is the most consistent and solid form of preservation, definitely. Well technically piracy is a subset of “DRM-free software” which is the true holy grail (all the advantages of piracy, with total legality and legitimacy!). To preserve software, it must be able to be copied instead of tied interminably to something perishable like a disc or single hard drive. Or, for that matter, a single online account that might suffer anything from a banning to deletion for inactivity to just “lost password and forgot the email and can’t get access anymore” to “the company that operates the servers the account uses no longer exists”. And piracy needs to be happening during the release windows of the software, not “be respectful and wait 5 years” - the only reason retro console libraries are as well-kept as they are is because people were dumping games to play for free back in the day.
Those Wii redownloads are tied to specific console IDs, and those console NANDs are just as vulnerable to damage or deletion or loss as normal physical media is. They’re even worse than account-based DRM’d media since account-based media at least tolerates hardware damage or loss (but not account bans or service EOL). Thankfully, every digital purchase on Nintendo platforms other than Switch 2 is fully preserved and made available. This would be impossible if Nintendo’s anti-piracy measures had ever worked for an entire console generation. Switch 2 games, on the other hand, are currently “loseable”. You might be reasonably sure that Nintendo will never delist DK Bananza until (insert threshold where you think it’d be acceptable here) but game preservationists also care about game versions. And it’s always possible that Nintendo finally managed to nail it and piracy for Switch 2 won’t happen ever (or for a sufficient definition of “ever”).
Capcom can’t even turn megaman into money anymore. Who takes them seriously?
Why would they need to when they have monhun, resident evil, devil may cry, street fighter, and marvel vs capcom?
I can’t think of another AAA dev that’s put out as many bangers as consistently as capcom has. Oh, and give them time - they’re likely cooking a mainline megaman as we speak. We don’t talk about the live service here, although they did convert it into a standalone offline version so idk - I’d have to play it.
they’re likely cooking a mainline megaman as we speak.
They announced Mega Man Dual Override for next year (40th anniversary in 2027) back at the game award event before new year, yeah. I don’t think we know why they didn’t name it Mega Man 12, considering that from what little they showed, it’s directly in line with the latest entries of the main series.
I wonder how many of those sales are on PC, where physical copies aren’t available. I also wonder what the breakdown is per-game.
For capcom? Not a majority, but I think it’s their largest single segment. I’ll dig up the details Edit: okay no it’s flat out majority in 2026, based on numbers listed in this kotaku article: https://kotaku.com/93-percent-of-capcoms-game-sales-are-digital-and-the-company-expects-that-number-to-grow-2000695728
Hopefully Capcom will put more of their games to G.O.G, they’ve already added some of their classics there.
hey look at that. gamers did it to themselves by continuing to purchase digital only.
huh…imagine that.
In contrasting perspective, we are now seeing the future companies that have been pushing physical media out for years were hoping for.
and all it took was a decade of consumer apathy to accomplish it.
said consumer apathy doesn’t come out of nowhere. consumers are not even most of the problem here. the problem is global capitalism. these companies have been grooming society at large to accept owning less, because we went along with it has a lot more to do with the kind of oppressive systems global capitalism thrives on than any sort of character issue with individual people.
