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)?
I always buy boxed games (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Digital distribution is not to save $$$ (Score:1, Insightful)
On the contrary, its to MAKE more money by killing the used game market.
As long as they keep the packaging shiny (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I always buy boxed games (Score:5, Insightful)
I also like physical objects, generally for music. Whilst I have downloaded a couple of games on Xbox and PS3 and I don't have the same fear of something going wrong, there is a huge downside.
I can't lend it to a friend.
I can't sell it on or even give it away when I'm done with it.
This sucks.
I don't mind the suckage on low-value items like Flower or Noby Noby Boy, or Xbox Live Arcade bits and pieces, but on full games?
No thanks.
Re:We have the technology... (Score:1, Insightful)
...and they keep clinging to the consoles until the day MS, Sony and/or Nintendo decides it's time to cut out the middle man and release a network-only console with massive local storage (say, 1TB hard disk - not unfeasible even today, let alone in a few years) and a requirement for broadband. Every game delivered online, every penny going through the console manufacturer's coffers (massive megabucks). Might even leave out the optical drive completely to save costs.
It may not happen with the next generation (the one that we'll see probably around 2011), but it's coming.
On that day, GameStop is dead - and there will be much rejoicing. The only question is, how long GameStop can delay for the arrival of that date for the consoles. If they can lobby the next gen to be still mostly based on physical media, it automatically adds 5-6 years to the life of GameStop - and belive me, they'll be lobbying all the console manufacturers HARD.
For the PC, GameStop has already lost. Online distribution will take over and PC game boxes will go down in history, joining cassettes and floppies. Oh, they keep struggling for a while with preorder box goodies, special deals (game X *won't* be on Steam because of a backroom deal between GameStop and the publisher, that sort of things), but the war is already over in that front.
Do you really need to ask? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Never! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
You've missed the point (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Here's another thing to consider (Score:2, Insightful)
With a lot of ISP's instating monthly bandwidth caps physical distribution could make a comeback
Re:Eve onlin (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not a good indicator at all really. I would expect Eve sales to be largely saturated already, and growth across any medium to be low. Slow box sales on this do not really indicate anything particular about success of distribution channels this late in a game's life.
It's all a question of media (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
They need to sort out the pricing. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I always buy boxed games (Score:5, Insightful)
issues with downloads:
- when the DRM server goes down, you lose your stuff. The question is not whether it will, but when. We need some king of DRM escrow.
- because of the drm, we're beholden to not only 1 drm system, but 1 file format, 1 software, and sometimes even 1 hardware vendor, or 1 product line form a specific vendor. We need a DRM standard, shared amongst all vendors.
- we lose the right to resell or even loan our stuff.
Re:Online sales (Score:2, Insightful)
But they also don't have to worry about losing their home if their wife or kid gets sick.
That doesn't sound like "bullshit" to me.
"MP3" for games (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
Re:Physical is still the best bandwidth (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Steam = DRM = Bad (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's all a question of media (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do you really need to ask? (Score:3, Insightful)
How does buying physical media make such products more DRM Free? There is still DRM the CD/DVDs. When you copy the game from CD to your PC in essence the same thing happens. High and Low Bits from one media are communicated to an other. Wither it is Computer to Computer with a TCP/IP Layer or from CD to Computer with a IDE/SCSI or whatever communication protocols that you use.
Sure there isn't Physical DRM's on Music CD like there is on downloaded Music. That is because the technology at the time didn't have DRM and you would break a lot of compatibility by adding such. But for games they have been doing DRM on Physical Media for about 20 years in one form or an other.
Self Booting Games formatted in their own format to make it hard to copy using DOS Commands. Or putting in Bad sectors on the disks in particular spots and running a check to make sure they are still there.
Then when Hard drives became popular on PC's they did a stop to this just because the advantage of the extra size out weighted the risk of piracy.
Then when the CDs became popular again and before people had burners they started to make games that were partially installed on the Computer and then it must have the CD to read from. (I remember messing with Loopback mounting in Linux when it was still a new feature to trick Quake for Linux to think it was reading from a real CD not the actual drive)
Now that burners are common and Doing ISO Loopbacks in one form or an other they put time back into DRM again. But now most people have an always on Internet connection so they took advantage of that.
Companies liked Physical Media in the Past because it was their DRM. Now that transferring Media is really easy they need to DRM their Media. Being that they are putting all this effort in DRM Media they might as well skip the expense of publishing and just go for direct download.
You are not fighting the DRM wars by saying I will only by Physical Media... You are only keeping software costs high, without effecting DRM.
Sorry.
Re:I always buy boxed games (Score:4, Insightful)
"I can. And neither of us worries about ever returning it."
You can lend downloaded game content to friends? How, oh great and wise one, is this acheived with steam, XBLA or PSN? Or are we talking piracy?
"I'd have a hard time to find a sucker who would buy the physical copy as well.
ebay, game stores, whatever. You can get some value back.
"I can give it away whether I'm done with it or not."
So piracy then? That's the solution?
Personally I'd like DRM free stuff that I can buy, sell, transfer etc. Until then I'll buy disks or do without (other than for cheap-ass stuff like Flower/XBLA).
Re:It's all a question of media (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Steam = DRM = Bad (Score:3, Insightful)
While I like the convenience of Steam, let's not forget that if Steam goes belly up, games bought there will become unplayable.
They announced that in that case the games would be unlocked.
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.
He can get his own steam account, that ungrateful little brat.
Around here, anyone under 25 only gets to play with gcompris and maybe ktuberling on a locked up read-only account. If a stick and a piece of string was good enough for me, it should be good enough for them.
(waves cane)
Re:It's all a question of media (Score:3, Insightful)
Here, the broadband speed curve seems to be steeper than the "game size growth" curve.
I still prefer 4 hours of digital download to going down the shops and paying a whole bunch more for game if I want it NOW (talking about the UK here, 16Mbit ADSL in my case). As ADSL does not keep up with growing game sizes any more, BT's 21CN fibre network will come online.
There's a whole world of advantages to digital downloads:
My instantaneous purchase are often made when the games shops are shut on an evening.
They are re-downloadable, if bought from eg Steam.
They do not require me to keep a stack of 20 DVDs next to my PC.
They are often cheaper, especially if the game is not AAA just released.
Automatic patching from at least of the platforms.
The buggy DRM is often removed, meaning there's a good chance it'll next time we change architecture / OS.
Re:You've missed the point (Score:4, Insightful)
1. It's cheaper to buy the physical item
2. The DRM encumbered nature of today's video games makes it almost essential to have the physical disk and box, if only for proof that you own the damned thing.
3. The pirated version of the game can be less hassle than downloading the game.
4. You have to go to disparate sources to get different types of game downloaded.
Once these issues have been overcome we will be downloading games, but at the moment it seems a long way off. The publisher's of games seem to control the download distribution of their games much more closely than record companies do and let's not forget the games industry is still growing they have no particular reason to change their business model.
Re:It's all a question of media (Score:5, Insightful)
Most markets in the states, you do not have a choice. You have ONE cable operator, and usually ONE DSL operator, and that's it. If they both have horrible policies, you're screwed.
You could always MOVE of course.
So no, "get a proper ISP" isn't an option for everyone.
Fortunately I've got one of the "good" cable providers. Of course I don't do large digital downloads or participate in frequent peer-to-peer, so it probably wouldn't matter much to me anyhow.
Re:Rarely buy boxed games. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
And I want to re-sell! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
presents (christmas) (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's all a question of media (Score:3, Insightful)
As you said, "here in the UK...". In the United States almost nobody has the option to change ISPs (much less changing for the 'better'). I'm in a Charter area (on the east coast of the U.S.) and you know what my options are? Dealing with a 100GB cap they implemented without my consent or... changing to dial up. There is no in between for me at all. Do I download songs? Absolutely 3-5MB per song. For video games we are talking 4GB - 50GB per game. Therefore, my chances are good that I can only download 2 games or so (on top of my normal bandwidth) each month. I say chance because there's no telling how big the game I want to download is. One of two things must happen: American ISPs need to get their acts together and lift speed and bandwidth caps like they have not been doing... or video game companies can just stick to shipping my PS3 and 360 discs to Gamestop, Amazon, and the like.
Re:It's all a question of media (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it's more of a fascist corporatist model.
Because we treat corporations legally as people and because they had almost unlimited wealth for the last 30 years, they changed the laws to destroy capitalism wherever they could.
We are now free to choose from LeftSockPuppet or RightSockPuppet. If either sockpuppet looks dangerous to the corporations then they flood their news stations with damaging stories about the sockpuppet and we obediently vote for the other sockpuppet instead.
Re:It's all a question of media (Score:5, Insightful)
First obviously, no download waiting - if the DRM isn't as asinine as Spore's was, then when my machine needs to be rebuilt I can quickly put all of my games back on rather than wait forever.
Second (and I have done this) - I can sell my games LEGALLY to friends when I'm done with them and vice-versa. They get a $50 game for $10-$20, and I get a rebate of sorts. Can't do that with downloaded software (well, I suppose you could copy it to a DVD then find a crack of some type, but hell, your buds can do that, too). Kind of like the e-book argument.
Finally, there's the subjective (OP mentioned this, to be fair) - I *like* having the physical media and the packaging. Hell, Fallout 3 actually even included a REAL, printed manual! Woohoo!
To be sure, there are many benefits to download distribution, but it's nice to have options and I would hate to see the total demise of packaged games.
Re:I always buy boxed games (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting questions.
Firstly I would prefer the transfer not to have to involve a broker, in this case steam.
Secondly I'd prefer not to let steam set the price for selling it back, though to be fair they can't screw you any more than the bricks'n'mortar stores do. I'd like cash too, not tie-in to their network. Just because I might usually put the money towards more games doesn't mean I definitely want to do so.
Thirdly, if they allowed lending or selling to others then that would be great. Much better than selling it back to them because you then get to sell it on at a cheaper price to an actual person, and buy second-hand at a cheaper price.
Would I always buy digital? Maybe. I usually buy games mail-order anyway, and if they made these concessions to first-sale and the right of resale then the convenience would probably outweigh any attachment I have to physical media. Plus I wouldn't have to have so much shelf-space given over to game boxes.
Can't see steam, Wiiware, Xbox or PSN actually doing any of this though. In their eyes they would be expending effort to cut into their own revenue streams, and there's no government forcing them to treat downloaded games in an equivalent way to physical ones.
That said, I'm sure there will be a lawsuit along presently.
Re:It's all a question of media (Score:3, Insightful)
You can also play at your friends house and your house simultaneously IF you choose play offline. But this is true with most multiplayer games now that tie your account to a CDKEY. Your Steam logon is like your unique CDKEY. Although I'm not sure if you can play 2 different multiplayer games at the same time on 1 account (multi logging isn't possible I'm sure).
As for that REAL, printed manual.... where is it now? Collecting dust? Burned in a house fire? Dog/kid/wife ate it? Hopefully you can at least download the pdf if you enjoy reading the manuals that much.
I'm not saying Steam is without faults (if they ban you, you lose all your games tied to the account, but I haven't heard of any instances of that *yet*), and you are right the resale would be a nice feature that they could easily add (with limitations like you can't resale a game within x weeks, to prevent people just swapping hourly between friends). Although if someone hacks you and swaps all your games away, I would have to say tough luck... but welcome to the digital age.
Re:So then... (Score:1, Insightful)
Every single game I've ever played sucked
(hey I'm no longer a pirate!)