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Also, remember the marketing idea of the "Disney Vault"? In the 90s, Disney would take all their movies in and out of print basically, only selling tapes some of the time, and they'd charge top dollar for them, because you couldn't just walk into Walmart and grab a copy of "Cinderella" anytime. They created scarcity easily this way, since before ebay, finding specific things like a certain videotape at a thrift store or something was a lot more work. So they would charge like $25 for a decades-old movie and say "Get it now, before it goes back in the vault!"

I can see this happening with games more after the death of physical media. Create artificial scarcity with limited time windows and charge top dollar for old games because there will be literally no way to get them besides on their digital store terms.

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> I can see this happening with games more after the death of physical media.

I saw a screenshot of something like this recently with the pre-orders of GTA VI.

They apparently "ran out of digital copies..." of something that doesn't exist yet.

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It'd be responsible of them to say that they can only provide 1 million downloads on the first day, or whatever the limits of their contract with the CDN says. Evidence that it's fake!
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You saw a faked screenshot, but the meme is definitely referencing the direction that the industry is going and mocking this kind of artificial scarcity.
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Oh? It was fake? It was very convincing.

But yeah, it's a trend that will sadly probably happen.

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Hopefully emulation and piracy will continue to provide a reasonable check valve on this getting too far out of control. I don't personally engage in either at present outside of an old homebrewed Wii U, but I feel like the existence of those is important to remind the digital storefront/platform owners that at the end of the day they aren't actually the only game in town.

Either that or eventually we'll have to get some antitrust stuff happening to open these things up, though Epic's App Store lawsuit does not give me much hope in that direction.

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I would attribute Disney's use of scarcity as a primary means to drive film and TV box office and streaming dollars in the Star Wars franchise.

This is already under threat due to the Star Wars AI videos being released on Youtube, seemingly without constraint as of yet.

The videos are not Hollywood quality [0], however they circumvent rules Disney can't easily break like using the likeness of any actor at any age in any circumstance.

These fan made videos get lots of views. Even if they were all removed from YouTube, this will be a difficult thing to stop.

I believe a generally accepted "good" or even "great" unofficial, Star Wars film built without sets or actors using AI is inevitable. And that this will be true for any popular franchise.

The natural corollary to this arc is into games, where using AI to code most or all of a AAA-competitive title would be considered inevitable.

I suspect Disney and Sony have at least someone pointing at this outcome.

[0] I suppose idealized Hollywood quality. They are better than some films.

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Don't requirements like online server based verification and advancing crypto make it almost impossible to pirate these games?
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Yes, for play-online titles for sure, but I think everything up to Xbox 360 / PS3 era has robust emulation and wide distribution of the whole library.

Obviously it's gotten harder over the years, but PS4 and PS5 jailbreaks do exist so that means there's a vector for dumping games that were only ever distributed digitally (at least ones released up to the point where the jailbreaks got patched, as the stores will refused to serve new content until you update your system).

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Current-gen console jailbreaks may exist but are inaccessible to the vast majority of the public so I really doubt they will factor into any decisions made by Sony, Microsoft, etc.
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