10 Times The Games Industry Had No Idea WTF It Was Doing
9. Preparing (Poorly) For The Digital Future
Before the launch of the PS4 and Xbox One, the video game industry was convinced that an all-digital future was coming sooner rather than later.
As a result there was a huge push by the big three console makers to revolutionise their online storefront to make it easier than ever for customers to buy their games straight from the source.
Of course the biggest publishers still had a rather intimate relationship with your average brick-and-mortar game stores, meaning that the online storefront wasn't able to undercut the prices of shops like Game and Gamestop.
Not only that, but the big publishers seemingly didn't understand the main appeal of these stores in the first place: the fact that you could buy titles secondhand or share them with your friends.
So the online storefront was not only much more expensive than your average real life store, but the restrictions that came with buying digital (not to mention the huge download files that came with it) meant that players weren't eager to follow publishers into the all-digital future like they were expecting.