I run a small game store. Town of short of 80k citizens. My main competitor is a couple of large electronic retailers (famously known for selling games at a loss). I sell a few hundred copies of the best sellers, 20-40 of the smaller (but popular) titles, and maybe sub-10 of some niche stuff. Single player stuff sells better than online multiplayer focused stuff. It's also easier to build customer loyalty with customers who've also bought the hardware at your store.... now, the problem with hardware is that first party hardware, ESPECIALLY FROM SONY sells at a low profit margin. You compete with all the warehouses on hardware and accessories. So you don't really have a lot of profit to gain from first-party hardware sales, just a lot of money frozen in stock that takes a lot of shelf and storage space. Games, on the other hand gives us some regular sales with a profit margin that varies a bit, depending on vendor and whether or not the larger retailers stock them and we have to compete with them. Pre-owned games gives us more profit. Merchandise and certain third party accessories also produces money. Now... if we end up not having NEW games, we'll end up only having pre-owned for older consoles (which is fine, and quite normal for a lot of entusiast stores these days), but the problem with not having NEW games is that we really have no incentive to sell consoles that we don't really have any profit on. This goes for the big retailers too. Which in turn means... price increase on first-party hardware... so we actually can make a profit "on something". Selling hardware at 0 profit or at a loss has been accepted at retail as we've always had a way to win that money through a steady stream of other related products. If we lose the revenue stream from games, we're left with accessories only, and people don't replace accessories as often as they buy new games... And if they go some sort of code-in-box route... physical games without a physical value can't cost as much as proper physical games. This has been clearly communicated to several vendors already, and it's not without reason most releases that are code-in-box are either shovelware stuff, games with sunset physical production or stuff that had unexpected demand and they had to "just do something" to get a physical presence to meet demands... and, again, those have all been cheaper than regular physical releases of the same title or other titles from said vendors catalog.