As Downloads Take Over, a Turning Point for the Video Game Industry
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
TBF, the same could be said for Steam.
The argument is more that not only is Gamestop in a diminishing market, people won't even miss it because they have unpleasant memories of it. If Gamestop was this cool amazing video game community hub thing that I loved, I might go there, and end up buying games while I'm there anyways.
I'm all for buy low-sell high (I never sold because it wasn't worth the trade, but thats just me) - but buying from GameStop just leaves you with a gimp product.
A large part of that can't be blamed on GS. Developers are all after the PreSale bonus', DLC and anything that stops secondary sales.
As much as I love Steam, it is worrysome that I don't even have the option of reselling my games. (On the same token: I generally don't buy unless it's 50-75% off, so...)
Blockbuster :: Netflix :: actual movie theatre
Old Gamestop :: Steam :: new gamestop with all but the rarest used games hauled away, & using the space for pod enclosures that create individual and co-op immersive experiences, rentable by the hour while parents shop at surrounding stores, run errands, etc.
Studios get immersive demos, suburban gamers have a new social activity, and gamestop continues to have a reason to exist.
It's interesting to note, however, that a variation on this idea has already come and gone: arcades. Those were the places you went to when you wanted to play a game somewhere other than your home.
I wonder if games could release to arcades before releasing to the public. But somehow that doesn't seem quite as practical.
Previously, each console generation came with newer cartridges, then with newer disc formats (CD, then DVD, then HD-DVD / Blu Ray). But this generation just stuck with Blu Ray. That signaled to me that this may very well be the last generation to even support physical media.
If this console generation lasts the typical ~7 years or so... do we expect people to still be using any physical media in the early 2020s?
Edit: Fair enough, it seems games are doing this already, so maybe this argument isn't as valid as it used to be.
It should be noted that most AAA games install themselves to disk anyways to help alleviate loading times (especially in the PS4's case, as Blu-Ray is sloooow)
500 GB really isn't enough for a heavy gamer.
Although in good news the SSD disk storage sizes are only going up and the price is coming down, so by the next console generation it should be practical to put in a 1TB SSD into a cheap console.
This insane upgrade cycle will disappear. Steam Machines will hopefully increase competition in consoles market and will push MS and Sony to upgrade their hardware more frequently.
The reason Sony upgrades media on its consoles is that Sony is a holding that also holds companies developing the said media and companies distributing movies/music on the same media. It's a cross-promotion.
The problem is it's a cost center. And downloading will always be more convenient. Connections are easily fast enough to transfer the static data.
Guess we're still a little ways away from that. I remember using Steam when it was new for HL2. I cracked open a beer to enjoy while it downloaded, happy i didn't have to drive for a half hour or so to pick up a copy at gamestop.
I had good broadband. However, it took all day and evening until around 2-3 AM for it to finish downloading. Things were over saturated i guess. I didn't re-use steam until a decade later since it left such a poor impression with their one 33.6 modem uploading the game to everyone.
Surprisingly, that didn't quite happen yet. Some games like the Witcher 3 reported[1] a major percentage to be retail sales (almost 75%). I expected it to be way lower already.
[1]. http://www.dsogaming.com/news/the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-30-of-...
Pure digital distribution takes retailers out of the equation (or even if majority of sales are digital, retailers don't have strong influence anymore), and developers can easily set prices any way they want - for instance one flat price everywhere if they wish.
There are lots of people on capped satellite/3G/"water tower" internet who enjoy gaming that are going to be cut out of the market if consoles go to a pure digital distribution system. Additionally, gamers in very remote locations (submarines, remote foreign villages, etc) couldn't have the latest releases mailed to them. Somehow they'd have to find a broadband connection. It doesn't make much sense to eliminate a class of paying customers by switching to 100% digital distribution.
And it's indeed easy to make it a service on demand, when they get the digital game and ship it to you on a small flash drive. It's not a problem for DRM-free games, and may be GOG can even start offering such service in the future. DRMed games however shoot themselves in the foot by making it too hard, but I personally don't care about them.
I've got ~10/1 ADSL (nominally 8 megabits on a good day). This console generation is really testing the limits of my bandwidth - Halo 5 is 60+ GB, and it doesn't help when you've got errors like http://www.iinet.net.au/status/4438711 happening. 60GB would take 16 hours which is overnight-and-a-bit.
Unfortunately the One is not fault tolerant at all. I'll turn it on in the morning and it won't have started at all (despite having the settings right for "download while in low power mode).
I can't imagine using the Xbox One as a download-only console if you're on anything less than true unlimited data (I did 400GB of XBox/Netflix content alone last month).
I should put this in a blog post at some point but I'm seeing this more and more from Microsoft and Google - assume everyone's on 100MB+ connections.
e.g.
* OneDrive has no LAN sync, placeholder files have been removed so you can't even have your files available "on demand"
* Google removing SD card support left right and centre.
Legacy DSL is indeed a problem for that. High end games (and PC ones are even more so than console ones) are huge.
As I wrote below - DRM free games can solve this with services which will just ship you a game on flash storage on demand. DRMed ones however (and most current consoles are sick with DRM) would have an issue with such method. Your option could be ditching such consoles and sticking to DRM-free games and platforms.
Two hours of play is already a longer return period than most physical game retailers have offered.
I hope it is being used to incentivize publishers to fix their shit before release, rather than dumping buggy, broken, incomplete trash on their captive pre-orders.
Most of my Steam orders are sale items, so my calculus is that it really only has to give me as much enjoyment as the equally costly big coffee at Starbucks for it to be worthwhile, and that's a low bar.
As for reselling games, that would seriously hurt developers. A single game could be resold 100s of times, but only the first sale goes to the developer, and everyone else in the chain plays for free.
Video games have been resold since video games were invented and there still continue to be new titles.
The worrying thing about digital is it could be vastly easier to trade used games. There is no worrying about scratched discs, and you don't get pennies on the dollar for the trade. You could just play used games endlessly without ever spending more than an initial investment.
It's not really strange, it's been this way for years. When have you ever been able to sell software you downloaded? Neither Apple or Google let you sell used apps, steam has never allowed used game sales, etc.
And it makes way more sense this way. You are not buying a physical object that took labor and resources to produce. A physical object that would go to waste otherwise. You are buying a bunch of bits which can be copied endlessly. There's no depreciation over time, no downside to buying used over new. No personal attachment to a specific object when you can just download it again when you want to play it. No middlemen to take a cut out of the trade so that you can just buy and sell it at exactly the same price.
The reason multi-platform games aren't cheaper on PC, is because Gamestop or console makers have contracts that prevent it. If you put your game on PC at a lower price, they will stop selling it.
Software takes 0 effort and 0 resources to produce more copies. All of the cost comes from the initial development. The actual disks or bandwidth for downloads costs pennies.
So when you sell a chair, you aren't decreasing the quality of future chairs in any way. Fewer chairs bought, just means there will be fewer chairs made the next year. Maybe a single chair maker will lose his job. Which sucks for him. But he really isn't needed because the world doesn't need more chairs.
With software, less demand means less quality. When you get less sales, then the budget for the next video game will be less and less. Fewer niche games will be made because the budget gets too small to support them.
Even though the demand is theoretically there - there are enough gamers willing to spend money on such a game to support it. The problem is it creates a free rider problem where no one wants to be the one to pay for it, when they can just free ride off of used games and not spend a dime.
Second, the very important difference is time sensitivity. Games get the majority of their sales in the first month, and it slowly declines after that. If everyone sells used, then all of the sales after the first month don't matter. So the vast majority of their income is lost.
I don't think it's entirely ridiculous that you can't resell an item that never degrades. If this was possible, it would be a huge blow to publishers. Imagine a new game being released on PS4 for $60. A good number of people buy the game at release, play it through and then put it up on a marketplace at a lower price. At this time, there is zero incentive for a buyer to get it from PlayStation store since he will get the exact same product in either case.
I say this as a gamer who exclusively buys digital downloads these days. Would I like to be able to resell downloaded games? Yes. I just don't think it's realistic.
Thats an argument for protectionism, but not for consumer benefit. In fact it feels like the opposite -- using IP law to force consumers to pay more for the exact same product that could be bought "used."
Love, the music industry
(in all seriousness, it was only a matter of time...we just needed the technology to do it)
As for reselling games, this just gives any game with online content tied to an account an inherent advantage. Charging every user can be done with or without physical media. If the static data itself commands a price, probably you are doing it wrong. You want people to pass that around for free as a favor.
Those are really the limiting factors, I think.