How Much Longer Will Physical Game Distribution Survive? 478
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)?
Eve onlin (Score:5, Informative)
It could be now if they are willing. (Score:3, Informative)
> 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.
Re:Physical is still the best bandwidth (Score:5, Informative)
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 [homepages.cwi.nl] going from 1982(log scale, so it's exponential)
Re:Physical is still the best bandwidth (Score:5, Informative)
Now do a list of game sizes. It will probably go something like this (install size):
1995 20MB
1999 400MB
2004 4000MB
2008 10000MB
Re:Online sales (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I always buy boxed games (Score:3, Informative)
I agree this is crap but it's exactly the direction the publishers want to go in. They still equate this kind of thing with lost sales.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Online sales (Score:2, Informative)
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 [blogspot.com]
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
Re:Online sales (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Online sales (Score:2, Informative)
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 [blogspot.com]
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 [wikipedia.org]
The US spends around 5% of GDP total on defense. Actually Medicate is already in trouble
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States) [wikipedia.org]
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
Re:I always buy boxed games (Score:2, Informative)
"Disk can and will break"
Yea if you treat them like Shit?? I have PS1 games that are perfectly spotless and scratch free. That's over 15 years ago and they still play like new, whenever i decide to play them.
Re:Never! (Score:1, Informative)
I know it doesn't help you much now, but they did finally set up a website you can use to transfer the rights for your DLC to another 360. I'm really fortunate my box waited to die until after this essential feature was implemented.
Re:It's all a question of media (Score:3, Informative)