Sony has put forward an argument for why gamers would still want to buy their PlayStation consoles even after announcing they would stop making physical disc games.
CFO Lin Tao was asked if PlayStation consoles would become too similar to PCs, which stopped having physical disc games after Steam themselves ended their Steamworks experiment a decade ago. Lin said this:
We don’t feel that the disc is the factor to differentiate from the PC. For PC, there’s certain ways to play with the PC as an user. It’s a long tail. Our strength is that the curated contents, that’s one of our strength.
The game environment being stable, that’s another strength. Compared to the high-end gaming PC, our product is more affordable. We don’t feel that the disc itself is a strong factor for differentiation. Going forward, we can coexist peacefully with PC games.
Of course, PC gamers don’t need to play on high-end gaming PCs. In fact, that prospect has become increasingly unpopular, thanks to the unreasonable increase in PC and component prices, as well as Moore’s Law yielding smaller rewards in performance.
It would be obviously easy for gamers to give up on PlayStation, and its AAA games.
