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How Much Longer Will Physical Game Distribution Survive?
GamesIndustry is running an interview with Theodore Bergquist, CEO of GamersGate, in which he forecasts the death of physical game distribution in favor of digital methods, perhaps in only a few years. He says, "Look at the music industry, look at 2006 when iTunes went from not being in the top six of sellers — in the same year in December it was top three, and the following year number one. I think digital distribution is absolutely the biggest threat [traditional retailers] can ever have." Rock, Paper, Shotgun spoke with Capcom's Christian Svensson, who insists that developing digital distribution is one of their top priorities, saying Capcom will already "probably do as much digital selling as retail in the current climate." How many of the games you acquire come on physical media these days? At what point will the ease of immediate downloads outweigh a manual and a box to stick on your shelf (if it doesn't already)?
In general, if I've paid for something, I want a tangible object.
I've this constant concern that *something* will go wrong in the digital process. I know it probably wont, and generally hasn't, but I'd still much rather be able to say "look - I _do_ own this, I've got the box and everything". That said, I don't have any paper records for, say, my banking. Priorities and all that.
On the contrary, its to MAKE more money by killing the used game market.
I mean, seriously, who doesn't like those shiny boxes with the manual, maps and stuff like that? And having the original packaging even many years later? We're talking about some serious bragging rights here.
...and they keep clinging to the consoles until the day MS, Sony and/or Nintendo decides it's time to cut out the middle man and release a network-only console with massive local storage (say, 1TB hard disk - not unfeasible even today, let alone in a few years) and a requirement for broadband. Every game delivered online, every penny going through the console manufacturer's coffers (massive megabucks). Might even leave out the optical drive completely to save costs.
It may not happen with the next generation (the one that we'll see probably around 2011), but it's coming.
On that day, GameStop is dead - and there will be much rejoicing. The only question is, how long GameStop can delay for the arrival of that date for the consoles. If they can lobby the next gen to be still mostly based on physical media, it automatically adds 5-6 years to the life of GameStop - and belive me, they'll be lobbying all the console manufacturers HARD.
For the PC, GameStop has already lost. Online distribution will take over and PC game boxes will go down in history, joining cassettes and floppies. Oh, they keep struggling for a while with preorder box goodies, special deals (game X *won't* be on Steam because of a backroom deal between GameStop and the publisher, that sort of things), but the war is already over in that front.
At what point will the ease of immediate downloads outweigh a manual and a box to stick on your shelf (if it doesn't already)?
At the point where I can download a DRM-less installer or ISO and do whatever the hell I want with it.
Anything short of that, and I'll keep buying physical media.
Simply stated, if companies stop selling their games on physical media, then I shall stop buying their games.
I've been fucked over by DRM-laden downloads on the 360, thanks very much. Every time mine goes back for repair, none of my paid-for-DLC works on the new box I get back, and I have to get into an hour-long argument with tele-bozos to sort it out. I have no interest in extending that process to every game I own.
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"Digital distribution" and "on-line stores" are not synonymous.
I buy most of my games and movies from on-line stores, but I still get physical media for my cash. This is also true for AAA titles - my copy of MutantExploder7 will land on my doormat on the day of release.
It is the prevalence of low-overhead (and sales tax avoiding) on-line retailers that has been killing bricks-and-mortar establishments for the last 10 years.
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With a lot of ISP's instating monthly bandwidth caps physical distribution could make a comeback
It's not a good indicator at all really. I would expect Eve sales to be largely saturated already, and growth across any medium to be low. Slow box sales on this do not really indicate anything particular about success of distribution channels this late in a game's life.
If BluRay becomes cheap enough, then of course games from all platforms will be distributed that way. Who even on 3Mbit broadband wants to download 20GB games? Not me, that's for sure. It's all a question of media and the size of the game vs the size of people's broadband pipes.
And likewise it will be with the next media format, and the next, and the next. You can't compare MP3s and games because songs have a fixed size. Games do not.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
I bought Dawn of War II from the supermarket ; because it was a lot cheaper than getting it on Steam - even if it is natively a Steam game.
Why, in this day and age, are physical boxed copies retailing for less than the digital variant? In this particular case, there is literally no difference between the end results - both methods have the game, installed in my Steam folder, registered to my Steam account. Neither has any resale value. I even had to wait to download an update.
I would rather have downloaded it all, it would have used less materials, and perhaps given more money to the developer (in theory). But for less money, I got more value - I got a disk with a "preload" on it. So physical distribution isn't going away until the download costs less than a retail boxed copy, or until they stop offering boxed copies altogether, and the latter is probably the route that they will want to take - no competition, no discounting.
But they also don't have to worry about losing their home if their wife or kid gets sick.
That doesn't sound like "bullshit" to me.
You are welcome on my lawn.
We don't have "MP3 for games" yet. They're already pretty compressed.
Actually we have. It's called "procedural generated".
It might be not as extreme as in "Spore", but that's the current tendency among game developing studios.
Bandwidth have dramatically exploded recent years.
Storage size has also seen good increases.
But there's only so much content that a reasonably size team of artists can spit out within a reasonable amount of time and within a decent budget.
It took quite some time for games to start filling CD-ROMs.
And that was back a time of ever increasing screen resolution and color-depths, of cinematics, etc.
Now this tendency has curbed. Lots of player consider current graphics "realistic enough". We aren't much avidly awaiting a 100x increase of polycount or texture size for the next few years (some consoles like the Wii don't even bother bumping up the generation of their graphics hardware).
FMV cinematics slowly got replaced with in-game animations done with the engine it self (see almost 99% of recently released games - things like Command and Conquer series are rather the exception).
More studios resort to automatic/programmatic content generation for their assets to stay withing man-hours and budget limits (see for example the recent presentation of engines like Id's Rage which can handle lots of terrain details as the artist only paints heights and soil types. Or most recent FPS which use a dynamically generated sky box / time of day effects instead of relying on lots of artists designing lots of different settings).
Size requirement for games aren't increasing as much as the rest.
BlueRay disc are great for lots of usage (they will be useful to pack a whole TV-series' season on a single disc, they will be invaluable in fields that have to manipulate and backup huge amount of data, they will be great to store an exhaustive Linux distribution on a single media like Debian).
But the time until we start seeing multi-BD games will be long, even longer than the time before multi-CD games appeared, or even multi-DVD for that matters (there even aren't that much yet)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Now do a list of game sizes. It will probably go something like this (install size):
1995 20MB
1999 400MB
2004 4000MB
2008 10000MB
Try more like:
1993 The 7th guest: 1300MB
1995 Wing Commander IV: 3900MB
2000 Baldur's Gate 2: 2800MB
2006 Neverwinter Nights 2: 5500MB
2008 GTA IV: 16000MB
I assume you mean size of installer discs, since we're talking distribution? I'll gladly admit it's gone up over the years, but if you take the biggest mofo space wasters like you do if you claim games today are 10-20GB then you're way off. Sure, many games were only a few hundred MB but very many games today still do just fine on a gigabyte or two. Apples to apples games have not grown that much.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
While I like the convenience of Steam, let's not forget that if Steam goes belly up, games bought there will become unplayable. Yes, there is offline mode, but you can't switch to offline mode unless you're online and the Steam servers are reachable.
Whereas most of the games we have bought in physical form will still be playable even after the company who made them goes bankrupt, as long as the physical media haven't decayed enough to become unplayable. And there are precautions against that too, like VirtualCD.
There are also other possible pitfalls with Steam, like being banned. Let your 11 year old nephew play with your account for a few days, and he might get the account banned, and you lose access to all of your Steam games.
I am guessing that you live in the US. In the UK buying games from Steam cost anywhere up to 50% more than from an online retailer who is selling the physical game.
The latest example of this was Dawn of War II, Steam price - £34.99, Play.com price £22.99, High street price - £29.99.
Valve have a really useful platform with Steam but buying games through it makes no sense in the UK. Especially as if you buy Dawn of War II retail you get all of the benefits of steam anyway as it requires validation through steam regardless of where you bought it.
If Valve want Steam to be a valid distribution platform for new games (and not just special offers on back catalogue) then they need to renegotiate the prices they are able to offer to make them competitive versus high street and normal online retailers.
I buy 100% retail boxed, tangible products. I want to be able to exercise the First-Sale Doctrine to re-sell my games after I complete them so that I can raise more money to buy more games. I also want the market to control the pricing of a product. Historically, after a few weeks on the market, retail-boxed items can be found for half the price of their digital counter-parts. Why? The game sucks. It may be fun at a $30 or $40 price point, but is a regret at a $60 price point. The market realizes this, and boxed games can be found for $40 whereas the digital copies are still at $59.99 (ooh, but free shipping and no tax!)
Digital copies are just a way to destroy the used-game market, undercut pawn shops (e.g. GameStop), lock out libraries, and permanently tie a person to a product so that they can never get rid of it.
You cannot give a download as a (Christmas) present.
The trouble is that the chance of actually finding what you want in a shop is very small. It's all filled up with mainstream crap.
Every single game I've ever played sucked
(hey I'm no longer a pirate!)