Buona la Prima - Episodio 66

Pietro Faccio and Sergio Rocco of Buona la Prima take us into their wonderful world dedicated to the video game industry.

The Buona la Prima podcast is a partner of Biunivoca.

In this episode, Pietro and Sergio tackle a topic that goes far beyond the future PS6: how the gaming economy is changing and what this change means for gamers.

At the center of the discussion is the much-cited “Sony Tax”, a term that sums up the concerns linked to a model increasingly oriented towards digital, subscriptions and greater control of the ecosystem.

From the game you own to the game you access

The transition from physical to digital offers undoubted advantages: no discs, no distribution, immediate purchase and ever-expanding catalogues.

But what do we lose in return?

In the physical market we can buy a game, use it and then resell it. This means that the real cost of the purchase can be much lower than the price initially paid.
With digital, however, this possibility is substantially lost. The price remains, but a part of the consumer's freedom disappears.

And the used market is precisely one of the most important elements of the discussion: a system that allows us to recover part of the money spent and keeps price competition alive.

The risk of fragmentation

Added to this is the growth of subscriptions.

Individually they may seem convenient, but what happens when we have to subscribe to multiple services to access the content we're interested in?

This is what is already happening in sports streaming, where competitions and content are increasingly distributed across different platforms.
Gaming could follow the same path: more services, more ecosystems and, ultimately, higher overall spending.

The real question

The Buona la Prima discussion is therefore not just about Sony or the PS6.

It is about a broader transformation of the digital economy: the shift from ownership to access.

Digital is convenient, fast and efficient. But the question is how much we are willing to give up, in exchange for this convenience, the ability to choose, compare prices and resell what we have purchased.
Because perhaps the real game of the next generation will not be played only on the power of the console.

We will play on the economic model that we decide to accept in order to play.