Game Retailers Facing Digital Distribution Transition

This editorial at Eurogamer examines how the games industry is dealing with the growth of digital distribution — a transition they're handling better than other entertainment industries, but not without a few stumbling blocks of their own. "The examples from other industries undergoing this transition are not promising, since they tend largely to focus on metaphors involving creeks and a distinct lack of paddles. Bricks-and-mortar retailers of music and movies have largely sat back and grumbled while their businesses were hijacked, first by online retailers of physical product and then by digital distribution services. ... Specialist games retailers who follow that model face little more than a decline into insolvency in their medium-term futures. Worse again, they face competing with far bigger companies to retain their slice of an already shrinking pie — as boxed game retail sales fall off in favor of digital distribution, supermarket chains are increasingly seeing high profile games as a worthwhile loss-leaders."

Comments

Re:Why are there still game retailers?

[badboy_tw2002]

Two words: used games. You can't sell a digitally downloaded game back after you've played it. A game store will take a box title back. Though I guess if there were digital download rentals that would put another nail in the coffin.

One thing though

[dagamer34]

Digital downloads need to be loads cheaper because of the following reasons. They can't be: 1) Borrowed 2) Rented 3) Returned which means that if someone wants to buy a game, they have to get it straight from the publisher. Plus, our broadband infrastructure isn't really equipped to download GBs of data as the primary way of purchasing games. And then you have to factor in the cost of bandwidth that we'll probably pay for in one way or another and you begin to see that the real benefits are only for the publisher and not for consumers. I'll stick with discs, thank you very much!