Luc

Interested in games media and news, esp. featuring Destiny, Sony projects, Smash Bros, and Pokemon. Oh, also, I stream sometimes.

[Luc @LucLatitude]

This would fix me

[audri🪕 @oddtreebanjo]

coworker didn’t tell anyone it’s his birthday so i ran to the gas station next door to get his fav snacks before he gets here and decorated them with sticky note bows and i can’t stop giggling at my work

[Luc @LucLatitude]

Live, Streaming Pokemon FireRed Nuzlocke again. Today, we're tackling Fuscia City!
https://t.co/6OdKtkBIpG

[Colleen @Coll3enG]

my coworker just asked that I tweet “Only button that needs to be on the microwave is the +30 seconds one” says it’s gonna do “numbies”

[Luc @LucLatitude]

@MintBlitz HELL YEAH

[Luc @LucLatitude]

@PlayStation Your pre-scheduled tweets are not safe

[Luc @LucLatitude]

@PlayStation WHERE'S MY PHYSICAL DISCS SONY???

[Luc @LucLatitude]

@PlayStation Cowards.

[zanza 🔜 ANYC @Backslashed_]

Playstation soon as they make a new tweet:

[Delia @moonlightdelia]

Some of the Community Notes on PlayStation's latest post

[cav empty @cavempty_]

4th of july

[Patrick S. Tomlinson @stealthygeek]

Literary what Martha Stewart went to federal prison for and he just announces his kids are all guilty.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Mamdani: The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.

How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal. 

At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another. Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest. But time and again-including 250 years ago-those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress.

And yet today, too many of our leaders do not believe in a vision of this nation as an asylum for the persecuted-but rather as one that persecutes those seeking asylum.

As we mark 250 years, what do we see? 

We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions. We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world— one where children go to sleep hungry while the world's first trillionaire hungers for more. We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans. We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands —those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone —and we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few.

[NIB @nib95_]

Seen several quote #PlayStation's 78% digital full game sales, thus omitting important context.

That figure includes countless digital only releases, from back catalogue to indie games etc. Even Capcom revealed 84% of its sales were "older catalog titles", many of which are only available digitally.

So using such data is somewhat misleading.

To gauge REAL physical demand you need to look at splits of games that released both physical AND digital only. Thanks to the Insomniac leaks, we have such data on PS first party games.

Playstation Physical / Digital splits

Sackboy - 77% / 23%
R&C Rift Apart - 76% / 24%
Ghost of Tsushima DC - 71% / 29%
Demon's Souls - 70% / 30%
Miles Morales - 66% / 34%
Spider-Man - 66% / 34%
Returnal - 61% / 39%
The Last of Us 2 - 61% / 39%
Ghost of Tsushima - 51% / 49%
MLB The Show 21 - 39% / 61%

So per Sony's own internal data, 31/33 first party games from their chart sold more PHYSICAL than they did digital.

Uncharted 4 actually has an insane 83% physical split.

Granted it only covers through to a few months into 2022, but we can see from other more recent data, things haven't drastically changed. For example GSD data shows ~60% of Astro Bot sales across Europe were physical.

So what skews revenue and data more digital, beyond digital only releases and platforms? The answer is games with LIVE SERVICE components, especially multiplatform ones.

As you can see from Sony's internal data, MLB has the highest digital split, and it's a live service game.

Generally the highly popular live service or annualised games such as Call of Duty, NBA 2K, FIFA etc, have higher digital splits, as gamers are constantly launching them (often daily) and don't want to be constantly switching discs, thus skewing digital/physical splits.

It's very different to single player games which are shorter and have different play and consumer trends. So again, context matters.

Then there's a MASSIVE audience of gamers that aren't even accounted for in any of this data; the countless consumers that buy and sell used physical games, because they simply can't afford as many new games, but still buy/own consoles, accessories, games, services etc. Everything from poor parents, kids etc.

Ultimately, the data rejects the notion physical is dead or meaningless, even if digital accounts for the overall lionshare of revenue/sales, especially when you look at things with the proper context and/or focus on single player tentpole games, which is PlayStation's bread and butter.

Keep in mind platforms make a 15% licensing fee from third parties on physical games, while they get a 30% cut on digital.

Likewise first party lose a 30% cut to retailers on physical, while they keep all of the revenue on digital.

As I said before, this move to kill physical is more about PlayStation trying to make far more profit and squeeze away the last remnants of consumer ownership, control, flexibility and resale, and could have greater negative market ramifications.

[Marques Brownlee @MKBHD]

We should talk more about why the disc price and the download price of a game are EVER the same