Digital Distribution Numbers Speak To Health of PC Game Industry 192
An anonymous reader writes with this quote from PC Authority:
"Over the years many voices have declared PC gaming dead. We have seen developers abandon the platform for consoles, citing piracy as the cause. Game stores have slowly relegated PC games from prime shelf position to one tucked away in the back corner — even Microsoft dumped AAA PC game developers from the company. It seems, though, that the demise of the PC as a games platform has been exaggerated, because until very recently sales data ignored digital distribution, with the latest data released by US company NPD revealing that 48% of PC unit sales in the US in 2009 were digital. That translates to 21.3 million games downloaded in the US. Interestingly, although 48% of games were sold online, it only worked out as 36% of the revenue. This highlights the fact that it isn't just convenience that has PC gamers shopping online; it is also that games are generally cheaper than in stores."
History repeats itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Nowadays, we have a massive user base connected to a cheap digital distribution network, the Internet, with no vendor lock on. You need the right technology and strong commitment to take advantage of such a powerful platform: that's what Valve did with Steam and, seven years later, it's still a great success.
Re:History repeats itself (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that better protection means guaranteed market dominance is inherently flawed.
People quite often choose a platform strictly for its being hackable, for its flawed protection scheme. And they will buy some games while pirating more others, generating some revenue for the flawed-protection market and none for the perfect-protection one. The other will get much better revenue per customer, but much less customers. And of course they will never get the idea just WHY does their console sell worse?
For how long after release? (Score:3, Insightful)
Amazon.com from a shifty third-party seller - $28 ( before shipping )
Steam - $30
Onlive, which charges you $5 per month AND eats your games when you quit, $40, if I recall correctly.
Mind=Blown
Re:Im buying solely online. (Score:4, Insightful)
Until it is DRMed by a Steam-like system, the owner vanishes and your game is gone. Granted, some boxed games these days have bad DRM (EA), but the old-school copy protection is as good as not existing. I've got 15 year old games I can still play. I doubt the same would be true of most modern digital downloads in 15 years.
That said, there are some sensible digital download sites (gog.com and, from the sounds of it, gamersgate.com) that do give you the discount and the freedom/fair use.
Breaking news: People like cheap stuff! (Score:3, Insightful)
Who'da thunked it - if people can get a game cheaper and quicker without leaving their house then they will! Next thing you know they'll be telling us that people go shopping in sales...
Equation to describe why the PC will live on... (Score:1, Insightful)
Low(er) Prices + Convenience = no-brainer (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of my game catalogue is on Steam these days
I remember when I signed up for the Steam service and paid for my first game - it was Half-Life 2, naturally
At the time, I thought it vastly different to the conventional model (and psychological security) of buying your games on CD / DVD at retail. I actually paused before committing to the order.... weighing up the pros and cons of online only distribution when I could just wander down to the store instead
Fast forward to today and, given the choice, I'll elect to buy a game via Steam over any other method. No expanding collection of physical media, no waiting in queues at retail stores where pushy assistants are trying to sell me wares I don't want and - one of my favourite points - no laborious installation processes and/or the need for a disc to be present in the drive to play the game.
I haven't even touched on the low price aspect of Steam which, except for some AAA new releases, sees software available for quite a bit less than in retail stores. I don't think I'm alone in seeing single games or multi-title packs priced at what could be said to be impulse buy pricing.
One thing I would like to know is how the revenue from a purchase via Steam is divided up. Knowing how small a percentage goes to the developer / publisher from conventional sales, I wonder how platforms such as Steam fare by comparison.
Valve Financials (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:For how long after release? (Score:1, Insightful)
With the added advantage of Steam deals which saw me pickup Borderlands for ~£7 the other day, PC wins.
Re:Low(er) Prices + Convenience = no-brainer (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm in a similar position. I own pretty much every gaming platform around, with the exception of the new revisions of the handhelds (the DSi and PSP Go), and when there's a multi-platform game I want, I generally look at a number of factors before deciding which platform I go for. But if I go for the PC (or if the game is PC-exclusive), then I want to know that I can get it on Steam.
Why?
First reason (and one that applies to other download services) - I don't need to put any CD/DVD/Blu-Ray in my machine to fire up the game. This is actually a fairly major point for me; yes, I really am that lazy. When I get home from work late in an evening and want a quick bout of gaming before bed, I do not want to have to faff about looking for discs. So 9 times out of 10, I go to Steam, or an Xbox Live Arcade / Playstation Network game.
The other reason, which is particular to Steam, is that I like the convenience of being able to manage which games I have installed, and redownload previously-uninstalled games at will with just 2 clicks.
However, there are a couple of things I would like to see Valve do to further improve the service. First of all, I would love it if they could make it easier to relocate your cache folder, or split it between multiple drives. I have 3x 500GB drives in my desktop and it irritates the hell out of me that Steam games always have to fit onto one of those drives.
Second, it would be fantastic if Valve could start to shamelessly abuse their currently dominant position to throw their weight around and lay down some laws regarding DRM to the publishers that sell over Steam. It does annoy me that many games are allowed to add DRM controls above and beyond Steam's own protection.
Second Hand Market (Score:3, Insightful)
they simply want to force everyone to have to purchase new which is why they have continually tried to get us to stop using the PC and move onto the kiddie toy consoles.
but now they are not happy with the consoles and are trying to block second hand games being traded on them.
i hate scum bag anti consumer corporations.
Re:Im buying solely online. (Score:3, Insightful)
You've not had any issues...yet. That's the biggest problem of DRM - people don't have problems at the moment and so assume that all will be rosy in the future. Granted, most media-based 'copy-protection' DRM is trivial to defeat, but it's the phone-home ones that are especially likely to bite you later.
9/10 people agree that most stats are full of shit (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The only people who want PC gaming dead.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Piracy occurs on consoles too...
The complexities of gaming on a PC are beyond many people's technical abilities... Having to apply patches, deal with video driver updates or incompatibilities put a lot of people off.
Au contraire (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think any publisher ever hated the idea of digital distribution (if only it could be made pirate-proof enough for their taste.)
See, ever since the 90's or so, most of the profit has been made by the retailers. Those make money both from the few games that are a success, and from the complete flops. Even games like Daikatana or Aiken's Artefact (which got great reviews, but IIRC sold a total of 800 copies and nobody knowns why) actually made a bunch of retailers a bunch of money.
See, some of us learned a 17'th century version of capitalism (which is also the version in the game called Capitalism) where the merchant buys a barrel of wine in France for price X and tries to sell it in England for 10% more. (Or 50% or whatever.) And if it doesn't work, hey, the producer got his money anyway. Most of retail in today's post-scarcity economy doesn't work that way. Producing stuff is easy, selling it is hard, and basically as a producer you pay the retailers for shelf space to even carry your product at all. If you made an Aiken's Artefact and sold 800 copies total, congrats, you still pay all those retailers to have it on the shelves.
Worse yet, basically the retailers know how important they are and often get to directly or indirectly got to set the rules for you.
The most trivial example is the current brouhaha over ESRB ratings, which exists because of one single retailer: Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart doesn't carry Adults Only game, 'cause god forbid someone may think that means porn, and that would ruin their BS corporate image. Dumbly enough it's also the biggest retailer. Which left the industry in the pickle of simultaneously arguing (A) not all games are for kids, so fuck off, we can make a game with tits and gutting people like sardines because it's for adults, (B) but this particular set of tits and gutted people is good for 17 years old (or sometimes even 13) because otherwise Wal-Mart won't carry it and we'd, like, not make as much money. (And of course making money overrides and moral considerations. What are you, some kinda commie?)
But, heck, even the E3 exists only because at some point the industry figured out they need a way to woo the retailers. That's right. It never was meant to be a place where nerds get their photos taken with booth-babes, except as a further way to show the retailers "look how many people are interested in our next game."
But generally, you have an industry which for a long while has been squeezed by the balls by the retailers. It had to keep brown-nosing them and paying them for the privilege.
I believe that most publishers would have sold their soul to the devil to get out of that, not just tried digital distribution.
Of course, it also had to be enough of a market share, and give some reassurance that it won't get pirated right off your own servers. Piracy, now _that's_ a bigger scare than the retailers.
Re:Of course. (Score:5, Insightful)
Steam has done more than offer great prices, they have increased sales. There are several games that I never would have bought if I had to pay full price. I bought Bioshock 1 when it went on sale for $15, which led me to buy Bioshock 2, once it went on sale for $25. Actually, I was going to pay the full $50 and just got lucky that it went on sale. But I have a couple dozen games that I would not have paid $50 for, simply because Steam had a reasonable price on them. A few I have seldom played, but don't feel bad because they only cost $10.
I know I'm not the only one, so it is pretty reasonable to assume that the lower prices drastically increase sales.
Re:For how long after release? (Score:5, Insightful)
And it is so bloody convenient it is costing me a fortune....
When it has become faster and easier to buy it than pirate it... I'm sold!
Damnit steam and your abilty to entice me to pay for things I would have pirated 2-3 years ago :p
Re:For the last time (Score:3, Insightful)
>1. Computers don't go obsolete like consoles do
No, they obsolete faster. A 5 year old PC is not going to run all the new games. A 5 year old console does.
>2. A keyboard & mouse > controller
There are other games besides FPS (for which a controller is better). Racing games, for example.
Re:Im buying solely online. (Score:3, Insightful)
If Steam goes down due to bankruptcy, or simply being closed down, Gabe Newell (Valve's CEO) said they'd turn off authentication for all games.
Is this patch in escrow? If not, the company that buys Valve's assets at auction might disagree with the plan to turn off authentication.
Re:Of course. (Score:3, Insightful)
It used to be the latest/greatest game was really the, well, latest and greatest. Now days, the technology doesn't really change fast enough, and the market is flooded with bad games, so there's no harm in cherry-picking some quality games from a year ago.
For example, when Uncharted 2 came out, I went and bought Uncharted for $19. I finished it in a week or so. Maybe I'll go get the sequel, but I'll wait until it drops in price. In the meantime, I've got more 2-year old games to chose from than I have time to play.