This point is very easy, really. Most of the digital marketplaces, on ANY platform, fall short. Badly. Bad pricing, no consumer rights, little to no services and so on…
There is one single marketplace that is incredibly better than the others, and we all know who we’re talking about. Our favourite PC’s marketplace gives a good example of what can be done - and it too is still far from perfect - it’s merely a good starting point from where big corps can take example.
Suggestion 1: right of withdrawal
Most digital marketplaces give no option about this. You bought your digital licence? It’s yours, and you cannot do anything about it. The best market we’re taking as example gives us two hours of playtime, within 14 days of purchase, to test the game - and if we don’t like it, we can refund it 100%. Every corp should implement this if they want to give us a good marketplace.
Yes, two hours is not that much - but we can work with that, and improve it later.
Suggestion 2: the used market
Removing physical media will 100% kill the market for used games, since there will be none. This is a really heartfelt issue for some of us, since it helps keep the prices low and get some money back for games we don’t want to keep any more.
The solution? Our example already has a very great internal market to sell game assets and collectibles - extending it to the resale of used games would be a natural next step. We won’t pretend this is legally or commercially simple - digital resale is a battlefield of its own - but consider what a small fee on every transaction means: for the first time in history, the publisher earns money from second-hand copies. That’s a deal physical retail never offered them.
Alternative solution: Implement a “reduced percentage refund” for games used more than the time allotted for full withdrawal.
Issue: the marketplace could get full of sh**ty game keys with solution 1. This can be avoided by making unsellable keys that have been paid less than a certain value. Solution 2 won’t suffer from this issue at all.
Suggestion 3: family/friend share
We all agree that it’s nice to be able to lend games to our friends and family. As for the other points, here too our example gives us a great service, allowing us to build a small community of up to 5 people that can share their libraries - going as far as allowing up to 4 of them to play the same game concurrently, if the actual owner is not playing it. Nothing to really say here: every platform and every marketplace should implement this in some extent. We must have the right to share with our friends our possessions - even if it’s only a licence to reproduce the content.
Suggestion 4: about prices
A lot of people we see complaining, also fear prices not going down EVER once the physical market is closed. This too is not an issue for our paragon: frequent sales give people the ability to buy games at a discount, allowing less privileged people to access games all the same.
Every market should have this. Every game should go on sale every now and then, or implement a strategy that automatically lowers prices as time passes - just like it already happens for physical media.
On the other hand, cutting off the whole physical retail market will save A LOT of money to the publishers: about 30% of the cost is in producing the media, distributing, and final retailer’s cut.
The whole gaming community would greatly appreciate it if even a small part of these savings were to be redistributed onto us in the form of lower average game prices. More realistically, as some of us know very well that game pricetags did not follow inflation and would’ve been already higher than they are now if they did, we would probably accept a guarantee that they will always keep not growing at inflation’s rate as they did until now. Examples like Popstar’s sixth chapter of their Bitty Larceny Bycicle franchise has its pricetag in a hard to accept range for a lot of us.
Suggestion 5: ownership
Another very talked-about topic is game ownership. With the loss of physical media, some of us fear it will be possible for us to lose access over the content we paid for.
What we ask for is to give those who fear this some sort of guarantee that it will never happen. A DRM-free model like the polish guys already do would be great, but there may be other solutions to the issue. This solution would also serve as a tie-in for games that get delisted due to licensing issues.
Chapter two: conclusion
These suggestions, together, will give us players much fairer places to buy our games, making us happier - directly bringing up the number of sales and, as a result, revenue.