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How Long Before Apps Overtake Physical Video Game Content Sales?
jamie writes "Horace Dediu crunches some numbers and comes to a startling conclusion: 'If you look at the red line above and its slope, it would indicate that, given time, the App store will overtake the entire physical media gaming industry. The time when that happens will depend a lot on the growth or decline of the physical game media business, but another four years seems a safe bet.' This follows on the heels of some earlier analysis of apps per iOS device and what that steady upward growth means."
Yuh-huh
which is totally what she said
Also, last years decline in physical sales was due to the Great Recession, and has already been reversed.
That isn't going to happen with something like Steam.
Steam has its own set of problems. It needs to fix the issues it has with "families", and how they want to use games. I want to buy a game and let my 7 year old play it without giving him my steam account. When he eventually moves out, he should be able to take it with him. When I pass on... does it just go poof?
Suddenly, simply having to take good care of your CDs doesn't seen all that awful. They can be passed around to who you want, when you want, and they don't disappear on you.
Of course, defective games infested with disc-checks and nasty DRM and anti-copying technology have eroded away so much of the convenience of physical media that people like you actually prefer to be locked into steams model.
I was in the mood to play privateer yesterday... so I dug up the CD, imaged it, and put it away, and fired it up minutes later (in dosbox). Took all of 5 minutes. That's how it -should- be, even with new games.
Is if you want to actually analyze game sales, the question isn't iPad shit, it is on computers. The reason is on PCs you now have a choice between retail/mail order and download for almost all games. Services like Impulse, Steam, and Direct2Drive sell pretty much every title online. Their regular prices are usually competitive with stores, and their sale prices are almost always better. So is a person wishes to, they can buy games online. It is a direct 1:1 comparison since we are talking the same games, the same platform.
THAT would be the thing to research. This just sounds like yet another tech journalist (using both terms loosely) who is infatuated with his iToys and thus wants to write an article about how they are T3H FUTURE OF EVERYTHING!!!11. Real research would have been to talk to game publishers and find out how their sales of physical vs download compare, and how that has been changing.
There's little data on it publicly, but Stardock, who runs Impulse and has published Sins of a Solar Empire, Elemental and Galactic Civilizations, says it is about 4:1 physical to online sales.
It is clear that the online market is large and growing. I personally buy nearly all my games on Impulse and Steam these days just out of convenience. However what I do has no bearing on what society does at large. Without hard data, it is foolish to say everything is going that way fast. It probably is in the long run, but who knows how long?
For that matter until game consoles start selling their games that way there is going to be a large physical games market there. Currently only some things, mostly smaller more indy type titles or older games, are sold for download on consoles. All the current titles are disc only. Given that consoles are a big segment of the gaming market (as are handhelds, which are also physical sales) until that changes you aren't going to see a move to "no physical media).
I think we'll see the day when physical media is more or less totally dead, but I could see it being 30-40 years before it happens.
Downloads don't revolutionize music consumption in the way the cassette did
Are you kidding?
Cassettes allowed portable playback - great. But digital downloads just made impulse buying possible. You can buy anywhere, anytime. It's not convenient to buy from a physical music store unless you're already in one.
Does my bum look big in this?
What do you consider Steam? It isn't physical media, and it isn't the Apple app store either.
Steam probably sells a sizeable percentage of all video games right now, and is steadily increasing it's market share.
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
The video game industry is not in danger until all these phones with games start getting dedicated buttons for those games. Touch screens and motion controls do not now, nor will they ever replace buttons.
Seriously, comment mod points are..umm...pointless, when the stories themselves should be modded -1.
How does this half-assed amateur blog nonsense make it to the front page of /. anyway? Is it really that slow of a news day for tech? Sheesh...
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