New Tariffs May Lead Publishers To Abandon Physical Games, Says Analyst

Circana's Mat Piscatella has shared his belief that physical video games that would be subject to these tariffs may simply not be made. Instead, publishers are likely to lean even harder on digital sales. Piscatella has previously written about the potential impact of these tariffs, while noting that manufacturing game discs in America isn't a viable option since physical sales have been declining for years. Gamespot

This is an interesting way of circumventing tariffs. At least for now.

Excuse they've been waiting for.

1. Use it an excuse to raise game prices even higher

2. Trump destroys America, tariffs removed

3. Keep games the exact same price

Why?

Idiots ... i mean gamers... have proven they're more then happy to bend over and take it. Just jack up the prices across the board

Physical sales were already declining. This is another nail in the coffin.

Physical sales are already on the decline.

This would give developers another motivation to do so.

Although I agree with making games 100% digitally, I don’t think this trade war will have any winners for either country. Lots of jobs lost,LOTS. Nothing funny comes of this and nothing good of it. Unfortunately the U.S. started the trade war. I like Trump,but this Tariff bs has got to be scrapped.

Excuse they were handed gift wrapped with a bow on top.

This would actualy work if they did it. There is a demographic that will buy everything indiscriminately.

Eh. Inevitable conclusion of a long-term trend. The PC is there already, this is just consoles catching up.

lol :P

At least i have some physical games. Wouldn't feel the same without some (3 shelves) physical games lying around. That said, I'm fine with the move to digital. It makes sense.

I guess only in the US? Probably could still import them from other countries. Some other countries have physical games at $100 and people keep buying them so I'm not sure what's stopping them from doing that here too. How much of a price increase are they talking about?

If they do get rid of physical then they need some sane digital policies like what Steam has. For refunding, family sharing, etc.

Without physical that also means lack of competition in sales and pricing. Maybe publishers should be able to issue and distribute their own keys to whatever digital stores they want so there are more options for that.

If they don't start working on that, it will only increase interest in the Open App Markets Act further along to allow for competing digital stores on each device that supports them. It's either get working on those options on more favorable terms, or be forced to do it on the terms of an authority.

So this is "pro" number 98 of why digital format is good....

Meanwhile, physical is slowly growing in the "cons" while only having a handful of pros.

Still, this trade war is dumb and I don't support it. People should transition to digital of their own accord (or not, I don't care) because the pros outweigh the cons and physical is inconvenient.

Yes I think in that "Who is buying the PS 5 Pro" article from a different thread they call them "price agnostic" demographics, or something fancy like that lol.

Who been waiting for?

PC is already there. Many (most?) console gamers are already there.

I don't know if I would call the physical market "niche" yet, but it certainly was heading in that direction organically. No one is really forcing the issue.

Pretty much.

Long time coming for this I'm sad to hear. The netflix effect someone said once in another thread, negating the need for physical copies of things.

@mrbojangles25: It's just bad news to SW residents who are still stuck in the stone age of physical media. Already gone digital since the 8th gen started. I'm still buying Nintendo physical media however because Nintendo just cannot be trusted on the digital side. Maybe that will change once Switch 2 arrives perhaps?

@davillain: Might be different considerations for different people. Some have families and friends that share games and are not loners. Also some appreciated the better deals on physical games than paying more for digital. The last PSN outage was also a reminder that all digital platforms go down at some point and affected people who mainly play digital more.

It will be a shame for boutique businesses like LimitedRun and other similar ones that do a lot of good things for the game industry, such as providing additional content, bringing back old games that wwre unavailable for people to buy again, publish new games from promising studios, and also provide jobs. These businesses depend on people buying physical games for their revenue. It would be unfortunate if gamers lost these sources of gaming content that people really did appreciate.

Oh, believe me, I do not fully agree with eliminating physical games. I maybe a PC gamer but I personally want every gamer to have options on how they purchase their games. It's the publishers who really want to push digital but as long as gamers keep telling these companies they still want physical, it's never going away. I just hate that both Sony & MS really pushing an all-digital format. At least Nintendo still knows physical is still the ideal.

@davillain: I do a mix of both.

The lack of an MSRP here in Sweden often means I can find games for cheaper physical. But otherwise I usually go digital. Save for a few of my favorite IPs where physical is better.

Especially as most devs dont do much with physial any more. Its not like in the days of Ultima where you would get a map, a stone and a bunch of other goodies with your purchase.

That said, for the Switch 2, I am DEFINATELY buying a bigger storage card. I thought 128 gb would be enough for my Switch library. How wrong I was.

Yup, the more I think of these news. The more convinced I am that I should buy a 2TB microSD for my Switch 2.

@davillain: I'm guessing it won't affect other countries anyway, and if it happens here people will be p***ed. They were promised things would be less expensive, not more.

Honestly the biggest problem with digital even before this is the weird situation where publishers have to front royalties along with their physical production. This had caused weird situations where publishers will prioritize discounting physical retail copies but keeping digital prices higher to prioritize reducing the inventory saturation because lingering inventory is a liability on costs, distributors have to refund retailers later if there's sales, price cuts, price matches, or inventory removal. Digital will allow publishers to put their games on more systems than the dominant ones because it's the publishing expenses that are more of a thorn than the development part. Honestly perhaps this could have been avoided by tying royalties into the physical point-of-sale.

Anyhoo, perhaps physical can still thrive, just make the physical copies special, like beautiful collectors prints and such.

@lamprey263: Speaking of that, digital was supposed to be cheaper than digital day one due to not having to manufacture and ship anything, but it was kept the same so there was no price incentive. If physical goes away, the prices might even increase because there will be no alternative.

I am most likely out of the loop but who said digital was supposed to be cheaper?

Physical being an alternative right now hasn't reduced prices of digital, so why would its absence cause an increase?🤔

@Pedro: Well, nobody ever said they would pass any savings down to the customer, and evidently they didn't! But there was an assumption due to the associated fees and even retailers were worried about how much cheaper digital games would be.

@uninspiredcup said:

1. Use it an excuse to raise game prices even higher

2. Trump destroys America, tariffs removed

3. Keep games the exact same price

Trump destroys America? LOL...

There is a logical argument that can be made that digital should be cheaper and an assumption can definitely be made because of it. However, your initial comment sounded as if it was advertised as such. On the PC side of things, it has caused prices to drop but that is mainly due to Steam sale culture.

@dabear said:

@uninspiredcup said:

1. Use it an excuse to raise game prices even higher

2. Trump destroys America, tariffs removed

3. Keep games the exact same price

Trump destroys America? LOL...

Let's not try to bring up the President and we should all be only focusing Tariffs alone and how its gonna effect the whole gaming industry is our top conversation only.

@girlusocrazy: sure without physical publishers can hike the digital price like assholes, that's a possibility. But we also live in times where consoles and PC digital distribution is so flooded with games I think that will be a big factor on pricing.

Honestly I'd be more worried those that control the digital stores would be the more selfish ones, historically publishers and developers have butted heads with companies like MS and Sony over wanting to reduce price more than they were allowed to do. I can see cases where maybe it's not a good idea too, like if some publisher has a new game coming out ot might be problematic if a competing game franchise wants to have a big sale on launch of their competitor it could hurt the other publisher, not having those safeguards could make other third parties resistant to supporting platform in future.

Isn't the President of the USA the reason for the tariffs?🤔

Tariff's are a great thing for America right now. All the Trump Tariffs are, are reciprocal Tariffs that other countries are already putting on American goods and trade and have been for years. Trump is just leveling the playing field an eye for an eye and no more fleecing America and getting away with it.

Don't be fooled by fake lib propaganda orgs not telling you the whole truth about Tariffs. Again, every other country has put Tariffs on American goods and trade for decades and we are paying more, and they have been paying much. less. Trumps just fixing that and leveling the field now for America.

Trump will make gaming great again you'll see.

That is some interesting stuff but it will increase the cost of gaming.🙃

@Pedro: shhhh. He's not all there

@Pedro: Psst, psst. (whispers in Pedro's ears) Yes but we wanna try to not bring him up otherwise, the other mods might lock this thread. No no political but talking about the state of video games involving price increase and coming from Tariff if necessary for the sake of statement is fine.

(Not like I make the rules right🤷‍♂️)

Yeah, I hate this. Thanks Krasnov...

This is just the excuse Phil needs considering in 2024 and 2025 he has released more games digital only than on disc.

And when (not if anymore) MS/Sony and even Nintendo are the only place to buy games on their platforms, just watch the monopoly fly then.

Less sales, higher prices, because they know that people have no other choice on where to buy their ganes from, no more shopping around for the best price etc.

I hope this industry crashes & burns as my views on current day gaming goes a little something like this, I wouldn't piss on it if it were on fire.

I’m sure many companies will use these tariffs as an excuse for jacking up their prices throughout a lot of industries. Things are going downhill fast.

With physical prices of games rising. We will likely see digital costs follow suit.

And I very much fear this may lead to devs pushing less for shorter and sweeter games and further popularize the trend towards bloated forever games. I worry that these tariffs will further push AAA studios to make games more bloated to try to justifythe 80-90 dollar price tags.

@last_lap: You aren't wrong about Phil can actually use the Tariffs as an excuse of pushing digital in full force. Dirty tactic for sure but most publishers have been looking for an excuse for a long time.

Yes, I totally expect that to happen. But on the flip-side, digital stores may end up costing more on consoles than on PC as most of you already know, we can find plenty of deals on PC and whenever a new game comes out, it doesn't take that long for the price to come down and most new releases go on sale either a month or 2. (It's a good thing I came on PC)

@Pedro: only potentially for a short term but in the long term will be good for America and will bring cost down across the board long term.

@davillain: This is why a monopoly is never good, now I know your kind think Gaben is a "good" guy and has a "good" monopoly, but that's not the case. For instance when a publisher wishes to raise the prices of games on Steam did "good" guy Gaben step in and say no not on my platform? Of course not because he knows he gets more money, good monopoly my arse.

And it will get even worse when digital becomes the only option on consoles, as Sony has a current lawsuit ongoing because it's trying to stop retailers from selling game codes as it wants ALL digital distribution to go through their marketplace and their marketplace ONLY, that's a monopoly, and not a good one.

Phil is already trying to go all digital at present, last year more of MS games came out digitally than physically, and this year it's first 2 games are digital only (Avowed & South of Midnight) not sure about the next Doom game, and MS next release on PS5 in FH5 is you guessed it digital only. MS/Phil are trying to do this shit on the sly.

Digital only is a slippery slope to control consumers on where they spend their money. It's like people don't like options anymore, it'd friggin crazy.

Greenman Gaming is awesome aint it?

No it wont.

The price of both physical copies and hardware wont go down in the long term.

For microprocessors,

• A fab may take 2-3 years to build up.
• Training a sufficient ammount of the necessary solders, automation technicians, process technicians, welders to satisfy the need for microprocessors is going to take a generation. Very few, if any investors will take such a gamble.
• The cost of living is SIGNIFICANTLY higher in the US. Leading to lower salaries needed to manufacture these microprocessors.

For physical copies.

• Games are getting only more and more expensive to make. Devs are already looking for any excuse they can find to justify raising the price of games. When was the last time you saw a AAA game priced at 50 dollars? Like they were in gen 6? And PC and Wii games were in Gen 7?

Edit: I wont talk about the politics here. So I am keeping my response to you entirely gaming related.

Sure they will.. one excuse is just as good as the next. I remember them blaming covid 3 years after restrictions were lifted. Funny how profit margins just keep rising and employees keep getting fired. AI is to blame if ylu want to poijt the finger... awesome as it is it's taking jobs. People crack me up.