RIP bargain bin: The price impact of Sony's disc-free PlayStation plan

If you’re buying on the PlayStation Store, it almost always makes sense to wait for a sale, where the “Standard” digital price is reduced by 40 to 80 percent in our sample. During these periodic sale periods, downloading the game became the cheapest available option in a slim majority of the best sellers we looked at (10 out of 19). In many cases, the deep digital discounts meant a download could be had for 50 percent or less than even the cheapest used disc prices. But waiting for a PlayStation Store sale isn’t always a great deal. Even with those deep discounts taken into account, a used disc was still the cheapest option for seven of the 19 games we looked at (for two more, the cheapest disc was roughly equivalent to the discounted digital sale price). For a game like Dark Souls III, for instance, you could still save $10 by buying a used GameStop disc instead of the $30 “sale” price on the PlayStation Store. However, a PlayStation Store monopoly on game distribution doesn’t necessarily mean customers will be forced to pay high prices. In PC gaming, for instance, the lack of disc-based options for most games hasn’t stopped a “race to the bottom” digital game pricing effect from developing on platforms like Steam, and that’s before you account for the frequent deep Steam sale discounts. And on the PlayStation Store, there are already plenty of games that are only available as downloads that are still offered at bargain-basement prices to attract a large audience.