Amazon to sell PSN titles. Does this change everything?

IMO, The greatest thing about PC digital gaming is not Steam, it’s the fact that no one store has a monopoly on digital sales. Everyone from Steam to Origin to Amazon is competing against each other unlike the PSN store or Xbox Live Store that are controlled by Sony and MS respectively. Well, not anymore in PSN's case.

If PC digital sales are any indication, Amazon selling PSN titles means we are going to see some incredibly cheap deals for PS4, Vita and even PS3 titles. I am talking $10-$15 for games that came out just a few months ago. Hell, I bought Tomb Raider PC for $28 two days before it came out and got a $5 coupon for pre-ordering it.

To me, this changes everything. This will create an ecosystem where Amazon, Gamestop, Bestbuy and Sony themselves compete against each other to make PSN titles even cheaper. Only this time there is little to no distribution costs, no real inventory to manage and no employees to hire to run the transaction. Meaning even cheaper titles.

Kotaku Story below. Store link here: http://www.amazon.com/b/?node=1289533011&tag=viglink129408-20

You read that headline right. We're very excited to introduce the

Amazon Playstation Network Store, an alternate venue to purchase digital Playstation content for Playstation 3, Playstation 4, and Playstation Vita.

The downside of going all digital for the next-gen consoles was going to be restricting yourself to only one storefront for potential deals, but now that's not an issue. Sony already leaves its competitors in the dust when it comes to sales, especially with its Playstation Plus program, and adding Amazon's deal muscle to the mix increases the potential savings exponentially.

To celebrate the launch of the store, Amazon will be offering $5 PSN credit back on select digital purchases, and even better, customers who participate in the limited time buy two get one free promotion starting at noon ET today (Tuesday) will also get a bonus $5 PSN credit.

This is fantastic news for console owners. This is the first step into opening up console digital distribution to competition, which can only be a good thing for gamers and for the industry as a whole. And anything that takes money from Gamestop makes me a happy guy.

this is probably good for prices... but also the fact you don't have to give Sony your credit card information since their security is a joke and got hacked and lost millions of customers private information a couple years ago and it will happen again and from my knowledge Amazon has never had that happen. Same goes with xbox, they have awful security and hopefully amazon will handle their online game sales also.

Better yet you could use paypal and then pay amazon with that making your credit info even more secure keeping just paypal in control of it.

Basically don't let microsoft or sony have any credit card info unless you want to lose all your credit rating and have your info stolen and sold.

It still does not fix the problem with DD.

Great news. More competition will translate into lower prices for consumers.

A tiny step for console digital distribution, but a good step nonetheless.

When you really think about it, it's hilarious that Sony is right now doing more for console digital distribution than Microsoft.

500GB HDD is not gonna be enough...

This is definitely good because games are going to be competitively priced like you said.

Boxed console games have always been cheaper than digital ones because of competition. Now maybe digital prices will finally come down. Great news.

This is great news!!

Wooo! Competition!!

Bout time. Maybe this is why we've seen some recent sales on the PSN that didn't completely suck.

I agree, this does change everything.

I would be interested if it results in Steam-like sales on the PS4, where you can pick up older games at a drastically reduced price. That's the only way digital makes sense anyway (for me at least) because the lack of a tangible product to keep, coupled with no packaging costs and hard drive space used (which is going to fast become a premium this generation) should result in a much lower price.

We'll see. I'm generally optimistic because Amazon is pretty fucking great, and I could see them really going places with the idea.

This will be a non-factor if all purchases are downloadable at any given time. Amazon should have this feature as PSN and Live already do. It would be nonsensical if Amazon did not.

It doesn't matter if it's Amazon or whomever, they just sell the code. Once you activate it on PSN, it's the same as any other PSN game.

That's how digital retail works. For example, you can buy Steam games from Amazon, GetGames, GamersGate, The Humble Store, retail, whatever. Once you activate it on Steam, it behaves like any other Steam game.

It would be fantastic if this happened. But unfortunately, digital distribution so far has not resulted in any tangible discount over physical versions. If publishers want to increase digital distro, then offer a $15-$20 savings. They would save on printing countless copies of discs and boxes that would later end up in bargain bins for $5.

The thing is that Sony wouldn't make that deal if them and the devs making games would get less money. I bet games won't be any cheaper than on the PSN store itself.

Time to knock another voice off the PC advantages list :P

Next up: mods on consoles.

I think Epic Games tried that with the PS3 version of Unreal Tournament 2007, but it never caught on.

Interesting. That was the time when Sony still allowed Linux on the PS3 as well, before people used it for evil and that's why we can't have nice things.

That is pretty awesome news and a step in the right direction.

It Matters to me. Takes me 2 days to download 16 GB of stuff. I also have a download cap of 60GB a month (before hidden fees kick in). So I prefer to download only once. Not to manage free HDD space, by predicting when I feel like playing something and deleting and redownloading games

Yeah, and that's why thus far I've always opted for the retail versions of most all my games. If they want to get my business on the digital side, they need to incentivize me to do so.

So you buy a digital download for PSN through PSN, or you purchase a digital download for PSN on amazon. I don't see how that changes anything, unless you have amazon credit there is no point to buying it from them, it just creates an extra step to go through.

That's like instead of going to the grocery store and buying bread you go to a store next to the grocery store and you pay a guy to walk nextdoor to buy the bread and then bring it back to you.