The Shrine

I think Zeus and Sine started this one. I'm just bringing it open to discussion.

Digital distribution is certainly handy. It's cheap, convenient, and obviously the way certain platforms are going in the future.

DVD, HD-DVD(ha!), BluRay, etc. will give you the same games, perhaps at an increased price, but with a re-sellable value.

Will digital distribution become the norm? Retailers willl certainly oppose it. But at what point, if any, will publishers renounce hard media (thereby telling Gamestop/EB, Walmart, etc. to go fuckthemselves) and release their games direct to platform?

If at all, it will happen on the PC first given the success of Steam, who recently announced they've reached 15m accounts.

And........go!

I'll probably rant further in here when I am bored out of my mind at work, but I am pro, pro, pro digital distribution. I find it irritating that I can't unlock 360 game demos in the way that I can unlock Live Arcade trial games. I have basically no attachment to physical media at all. If I could get rid of all of the hard copies of my games and still be able to play them, I would.

About the only problem I have with digital distribution as it exists currently is that for most download services, your actual ownership of the product you are buying is fuzzy. Distributors need to figure out whether they're selling a product ("Here, have this game, and do what you want with it.") or a service ("Here, have this license to play this game on your profile or hardware."). Right now too many try to have it both ways: they don't want you to be able to treat what you've bought as a product ("No, you can't make a copy of what you've bought, and you can't play it on anything aside from this specific profile on this specific hardware."), but they don't want to provide service beyond taking your money and giving you your media, either ("Oh, the hardware you bought your media on is dead? Sorry, you'll need to buy a new license for your new hardware.").

I love downloadable media on PC. Steam is pretty great and Stardock is another one that's doing great things. I just downloaded Sins of a Solar Empire from them and lost about 5 hours of my night to one game. My only complaint was the price-- $45 for the download whereas the retail copy is $40 (they only are selling the CE online which is retarded... I don't want a freakin MP3 sountrack and PDFs of posters). I think digital versions need to be a bit cheaper still.

I agree with Andrew about licensing needing to be ironed out, both Steam and Stardock have the licensing of "you paid for a copy of this game to be forever tied to this account and we don't care how many times you download it" which is great. I can install SiaSE and TF2 on my PC, my laptop, my test machine at work, anything. This way it's nice that as long as I still have that account and didn't forget the username or something I always have access to the game as opposed to losing the CD or it gets scratched or I lose the CD key.

What I'm not sure of is how consoles would handle this... they're still not designed to have full games installed on them; they just don't have the hard drive space. Maybe the next iteration of consoles will have 1tb drives, but I still don't see console games going away from physical media and even offering digital media for retail games for quite some time.

There is zero doubt in my mind that digital distribution will become the dominant form of distribution for both gaming and movies (and likely TV shows) within the next 10 years.

The kids nowadays love it and either don't want to or can't go out to get their stuff all the time. And it's SOO much more convenient for what they perceive to be the exact same product, so they're even willing to pay the same amount for it. This is where I vehemetly disagree.

I've already made a case for the fact that digitally distributed products, in my mind, have less of a use, and therefore less of a value, of items stored on a digital media. As Lotus pointed out, digitally distributed media does not have a resale value. Great for the publishers since they don't lose money on used sales, but very, very bad for us. Imagine buying a $60 game that you don't like. Nowadays, you just take it to EB or wherever and get $35 trade-in for it. You've only lost $25 plus tax that way. So, say you're duped into downloading FFXIX for $70 for your PS5. You read all the reviews (that Squeenix and Sony bought), tried the demo that shows the only good part of the game (think FF7 demo), and even asked your friends who have been sucked in by the media hype machine if it's any good. You hate it? Too fucking bad for you, just delete it and try your luck again.

The other main issue I have with digitally distributed media is the restricted use. This manifests itself in a few ways. First, it's linked to your machine or account, so you can only use it there. I'm relatively certain that with XBL you can put your profile on two separate 360s only. So, that means that you can only play that game on two separate machines. And that goes for any DLC (downloadable content) as well (this is becoming an issue with Rock Band IMO). It's like downloading an XBLA game and even if you put that fully paid for game on someone else's 360 HDD, you can only play it if you have an account that has it "paid for" even though the full game is there (you always download the full game when you grab an XBLA game demo, they just unlock it for you when you pay for it).

The second restriction is time. I have lots of games that are older than basically anyone here aside from myself (from about 1978). Believe it or not, I still pull out my Atari or Pong every few years and play them, they're fun. With digital distribution, say your storage device (HDD or stick) goes 10 years down the road (it'll likely be less time but I'll make it long for argument's sake). I'm willing to bet quite a bit that by that time, Microshaft doesn't support the "old" software from two generations ago. So you can't just re-download it and you've lost your game. To me, these issues are pretty big and also signify a significant drop in value.

If it were up to the publishers, they would have gotten rid of physical media 20 years ago. It only benefits them. Regardless of how much it costs to make something, the pricing is based on market conditions. You price the product what the customer's willing to pay for and you decide based on that "research" whether or not there's an inherent profit margin large enough for you to take this project on (for those of you who took business, I'm referring to the Target Pricing theory, which I agree with wholeheartedly).

There is TONS of costs in the manufacturing and distribution (logistics) of games (and movies). Get rid of that while maintaining the audience we have now and you can just see the publisher's salivating at the margins. Imagine how much MORE money Activision would have made from CoD4 if it were distributed digitally rather than physically. I say at least 5-7% (likely more; for PSX games, it used to cost $12 US to manufacture, can't imagine what it is now) which for 4 million copies sold (so far) at a retail price of $60 equates to about $12M to $17M. And that's pure in-the-pocket money for them.

There would be one benefit to the consumer though: since publishers can eliminate the costs of manufacturing and distributing physical media, the costs of making the game go down. Logically, that would also mean that you have a higher chance of seeing "lesser" games being made. That's the sole benefit.

So, in my mind, digitally distributed games should be priced at a significant enough discount to overcome the shortcomings I've listed above otherwise it's not worth it. When Microshaft is trying to charge me $15 to download Halo 1 when I can buy it for $9 or less used on physical media anytime, it's ridiculous. When they wanna charge me $10 for a copy of Rez when I already have the game and there's not a huge amount of change (HD didn't do too much to the game IMO), it doesn't make sense. But, when they decided to charge me $6 to download the real version of Super Mario 2 Jap, I said "sure" (don't mind the fact that I only really paid $2 or less for it). If I saw that game on the GBA Classic NES series for $15, I would have grabbed it. So, for $6 I say "sure, it's enough of a discount".

It's not a Nintendo-only thing, I have seriously debated grabbing Alien Soldier, a Treasure game we never got, but it's got a premium price and just isn't worth the extra in my mind. If I didn't already own Sin and Punishment I would have been all over that, even for $12. Same with the upcoming Ikaruga HD if it never came here on the GC. Had I gotten around to actually playing Carcassone prior to downloading it for free I may have paid for that one too. And if it wasn't for that Arcade disc I probably would have caved and gotten Pac-Man CE by now too. That game is fucking incredible.

And I seriously doubt that either PC or consoles will dominate in terms of digital distribution. It started on the PC but there's many more console gamers now, it's likely to grow faster on the consoles actually, particularly when the userbases grow and we have full versions of the Nintendo (WiiWare) and Sony (PS Store) out.

It's all subjective and to each his own, but those are my feelings towards digitally distributed media.

I am fine with the current arrangement of both, I don't think one should replace the other. With some systems I am interested in the downloadable content, but not the rest of the games. For example, Xbox, I have an interest in the downloadable games, but the shooting games with themes of anger, power-technology, explosions, and heavy metal music are quite far from the flavour of videogames that I enjoy.

I have translated by entire music collection to MP3s and sold off my CDs. I think that tells you my stance on digital media.

However, I still think they need to make it more than just "here's your media", and forget about the manual, the lyrics, the album art, etc. Albums still need all of that, and so do games.