An honest takeaway from these numbers

The math doesn’t math - they’re wanting to increase the $45 made from retail to $70 - so about 50% increase - they say retail is only 12 or 15% of total revenue, so they’re looking to increase total revenue by perhaps 6-8% - the thing is though, if we look at a game like black myth: wukong, a game that got a physical release about 3 1/2 months after the digital release, it still had a touch more than 10% in physical sales - that means those players felt strongly enough about buying physical that they not only went out of their way to buy physical, but also either waited 3 1/2 months to play a game that’s been hyped and looking awesome for years, or they maybe even bought it twice just to have a physical copy. Now, it’s not a stretch at all to say someone who feels that strongly about buying physical is going to be highly pissed about this move and likely to jump ship - and it’s also not a stretch to say that not everyone who feels that strongly also bought a copy of wukong since not every game is universally adopted by really any demographic, weather it’s wukong, fifc, or even gta. And there’s plenty of games that have 20, 30, even over 40% of sales as physical copies, so I’m thinking 10-15% of players being fed up with and leaving the platform over not only closing out physical mid gen when they went out of their way to buy a disc edition console so they could further go out of their way to buy disc games, but also other things like lack of good exclusives, lack of vr support, rising sub fees, lack of value for subs, etc is a fairly conservative estimate, and it’s not as if people buying physical never buy digital either, or hardware like vr, pro consoles, special edition consoles and controllers, etc - so when these people leave they’re not just taking their physical purchase revenue with them, they’re taking all of their revenue, so losing 10-15% of the player base is losing 10-15% of total revenue for an attempt at gaining about 50% of 12-15% or aka: an attempt at gaining 6-7.5% total revenue. It was never going to work like that to begin with though, because whatever % leaves are mainly the ones targeted to convert - people already buying digital only aren’t likely going anywhere, but some actually might in the case of sticking with their friends and family.

In short, only about 6-7.5% of users need to leave for this to be a zero sum effort, any more than that and it’s a losing effort, and it’s probably closer to 10-15% leaving who might even have digital only friends and family go with them - this is really something that at the corporate level heads should roll.