"To be clear, these answers will all be from my personal recollection and understanding of the industry and business I sold over 5 years ago. I do not speak for PayPal Honey in any way nor do I have any current knowledge of how the business may have changed after I left."
I get that he's defending his reputation since this is a business he built, but man that's a wall of text.

He makes one point - the code being entered isn't for 30% off it's for 15% off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
189-code=160.35
that I'll read the rest tomorrow when I'm rested enough to decode it.

Their markup on cables is ridiculous. The store getgs 80% of what a Monster Cable sells for.

The last time I went into a Best Buy was after the Mario movie came out on blue ray. Went in on release day, completely sold out. Never got restocked. It's not all Best Buy's fault here since they don't control the supply.

I've noticed this decade that the studios are printing less and less physical media. And then when sales #'s are low they're using that as a justification to further reduce physical sales. What those reports very rarely reference though is the volume of sales vs unsold media. Back in the 00's they made more than they expected to sell and the rest entered the "product inventory stream" or whatever you want to call it, it sat in Inventory and eventually it made everyone money when it finally sold. I don't know the details but I know that in the 2010's the amount of time they would let something sit in inventory without selling was drastically reduced.

Now BB has stopped selling almost all entertainment media. -They- choose to remove DVD's and CD's, and it's a weird decision for a lot of reasons. They'd invested into companies that produced steel books and other releases exclusives to their stores - all that investment is now written off. New release Tuesdays literally got people in the door over the last 20 years. I've never seen my local BB not have stuff sell out instantly on release all the way up to removal week. So what changed?

That movie sales had to have slowed down enough for it not to be worth it to carry movies makes a lot more sense if the problems are on the supply side. If the studio's are going to continue pushing to end physical sales through just not making them anymore, NETFLIX I'm looking at you, it makes sense to exit. If you know that sector is going to continue to decline and hurt your own profit margin, why have it anymore?

And all that is ignoring that physical game sales are facing the exact same pressures. "I live in the middle of no where and have crap internet" isn't a thing for people with decent money anymore, Star link saw to that. And as much as I love physical media for gaming, post PS4 era it doesn't matter as much as it used to for brand new games. Hell, if anything you're saving time by buying the digital version because you still have to (*&^ing download updates and install the game it if you buy the disc. Those GOTY editions and collections with all the DLC's though? Those were the gold star of physical media in the online era and they're starting to not make them for newer games. And that's completely ignoring the app stores, Fortnite, a whole bunch of stuff.
TL;DR - we're going on 18 years of people being able to buy games without going to the store, and some of the most profitable games don't have a physical version to buy.

Add to that as others have said everything that's disappeared into newer technology over the years:
No more -
video cameras,
photo cameras,
personal cassette recorders,
desk telephones or wireless telephones,
cd/music players/boomboxes
oh yes and no more CD's, DVD's, or Blu Rays, and
TV's adjusted for inflation cost less than they ever were and aren't the only screen in the home anymore -

and you get maybe half of what was in a BB in 2004 that just doesn't exist anymore for them to sell. A lot of what they carry allows you to spend money at digital stores where they do not capture anything related to those sales. They leaned heavy into home theatre and that market is saturated on multiple fronts so it's not surprising it's being cannibalized first. Over the years more and more of the products they sold became obsolete, and that's not something you can really control as a retail distributor - you keep up with the products that are available. And they did. It happens that what one store has is pretty much what everyone else has these days and "where" you bought it from stops mattering as much as how easy it is to buy the thing and what benefits you get from where you buy it.

Side note: A big irony here is that Netflix used to goose their subscriptions by giving BB money for pushing Netflix.
And now BB is suffering partly because the people like Netflix who supplied them goods to sell are trying to kill the sale of physical media to buy and have a financial incentive for doing so.

I can imagine that this is going to turn into a mini Y2K problem of sorts, where most people won't know this hits something until it does. The good news is that it looks like they're just making it a feature package VS removing it from the OS entirely. Still, now I get to run a .vbs search and figure out what uses what and if I can get the person who owns it to understand the problem.

Re/growing new bones does NOT sound like the worlds least painful activity. I'll keep my dentures if it means I have to go through 24+ root canal for 2 weeks level of pain, thank you very the F much.

That's double the Gamecube, for example. I question if it's really a 20 million dip from the 360's 86 million in lifetime sales, since some people ended up buying multiple 360's due to Red Ring issues. I'm not saying it completely explains the gap, but it might be the reason not as many upgraded - they only had to do it once. IMO I think the biggest shot in the foot for Microsoft has been the naming convention. Just like the Wii U - the plebs can't tell the difference between this and older xboxen. Nothing is worse than buying something that costs that much and the hearing your kids scream because you got the wrong letter combination on the vidjya game box. And that particular F up follows your brand for decades.

which is heading into it's 11h month of supply issues AND sales records. You'd think if Sony was going to do this thing that they're suing these guys for. FFS I've been expecting it this entire year. Sorry you sat on your ass Sony, this really should have been expected with the PS5's panels. Again, I assumed it was designed in a way that Sony would have replacement panels available. It's f'ing plastic.

Removing past support isn't always to lock everything behind a paywall. If those files stay available, some of your customers are going to want support. Keeping the old files means that new customers may want support, (resources) for an abandoned format.

Dropping it now means not having to make the decision later, and future resources will not be tied to something no longer in production.

How dare the fans remake our games better than we do? If this is supposed to a step in shoring up their IP protection then they're way past the point where they can do this without pissing off the people most likely to give them money in the future. If this is a step they're taking before they re-release the older GTA's for newer platforms with some actual work done on them, see above.

Do you have bloat/abandonware on your phone from a carrier that you can't uninstall? Now you too can money directly siphoned out of your accounts and googles world class shitty customer service to be of absolutely no help! Watch as you contest the charges and have your google account and all the data in it locked away from you forever not because of anything you did, but because someone stole money from you and you had the gall to ask for it back!

That is part of my point. Its available - but who has a 360 library they want to revisit that doesn't already have an Xbone? How many few thousand people is that? This locks new users into purchasing from the store when anyone with a optical drive has the option of used/older games.

No seriously, they have been building up their library of older games as a selling point for the last few years. I guess I viewed it also as a way to atone for the XBONE's original sin's of being always online/spyhardware when announced. Who is this for anyway? Seriously, who? I can't tell who this is for on the consumer side, every single digital only console so far has been a wet fart on the market. Is it for the person who can't afford 300$ but can afford the extra hundreds in cost for buying games ONLY from the MS store? People who bought into the last hardware generation but haven't bought into this one? The shareholders? I guess if you've got an old XBox live login and never bought a ONE this generation you could justify this as a low cost entry to the Xbox store...but that makes no sense. Those are corpses and people who abandoned the platform, not consumers interested in buying into a mature platform.

How about contributing to society by both paying your employees decent wages AND participating in the social compact by paying taxes instead of say, using the most ruthless and unethical practices to increase the $-peen of your ruling class?

^This the last 2 years have been like watching toddlers learn how to use firearms. Everyone involved gets shot.

You keep doing it, ad infinitum.