There will always be a market for Physical ........ it will continue to shrink sure as the next generation of kids are all about digital ... but even with those, there will always be a select few who want a great object they can hold in their hands.
If anything it will just make it extremely harder for lesser known titles to get physical releases and when they do there will be no extra effort in "extras" and such unless the fanbase for the title can support it.
I think the amount of these so-called "premium retailers" as folks have been calling them will diminish or the saturation will dial back big time at least in the form of steelbooks as they wont be able to continue to do high runs at the big risks.
I think we are already seeing that as more and more of the Asian retailers are offering slipbox editions with amaray cases or scanavo keep cases inside etc. Obviously if the steels were cheap due to the amount of qty (MOQ) then there would be steels inside instead they are simply mitigating risks.
That said I've seen collectors go, but also collectors come. Its a revolving door here at HDN and so nothing is really different. And the folks who are better at their habits with guidelines of what they buy or collect stay much longer or never leave here. OR ....... they can buy whatever they want but dont collect everything. I'm a scatter brain with too many hobbies in collectibles but mine is like a circle where I'm into one thing then like a clock keep making my rounds ... Steels, Statues/toys , posters.
But
@blu-steel what I'm getting at is I've even seen many folks who collected steels just move on to slipcovers or collector editions/special editions, or even Vinyl. I've noticed cause if you spend a good bit of time in certain forums you'll notice a lot of the same names just differentiating their collecting. A lot come back into the land of the Steels tho for every so odd release tho...........
I know some winds of change tho that could/should inject some collector fervor tho.
#staytuned #HDN
