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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."
Something tells me that it will be harder to download the game hardware itself. And yes, you can buy it online, but there is a huge "I want it NOW!" market that online and shipping will never satisfy. But the margins will have to come down on many things, and value (Expertise perhaps) will have to go up.
Record stores are dead. Video rental stores other than a few major chains are dead. Why should game stores stick around? The only one near me is a tiny one next to a Cartridge World (ink, not ammo).
The A titles may still justify some shelf space at WalMart, but I don't see any remaining need for standalone game stores.
...I'm not buying.
The Digital download would have to really, really cheap (less than $10) to make it worthwhile for me to participate in this new economy. Why 10? Because oftentimes I buy a game on DVD for $20, play it, and then sell it used for $10-15, so my actual out-of-pocket cost for most games is less than $10 overall.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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!
Uggh. I've had some HORRIBLE experiences with digital distribution for games (EA Download Manager, Steam).
Give me a hard copy over digital any day.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Online play? What's that? (I kid.) No actually I have no interest in being harassed by a bunch of kiddies that lack manners, so the problem you describe has never happened to me. I prefer standard offline games - me versus the computer.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Your point 2 on non-portability is incorrect. Right-click on the game you want to back up and select "Back up game files", and there's a wizard that will step through the creation of a back-up archive that you can easily burn to DVD. The back-up archive includes a reinstallation utility that puts the games back into Steam without any messing around, and the wizard includes the choice of whether you want CD-sized volumes, DVD-sized volumes, or larger, and they're just standard Windows files so you can burn them onto whatever media you like using whatever program you want.
I keep backups of all my Steam games on my file server so that I can keep current games on my laptop's hard drive and store other games elsewhere, and so that I can migrate the games onto alternative devices without re-downloading, and it works well.