| vlad321 said: There are still many people who don't have fast enough connections to download 4 gigs+ on their HDDs. Especially in the US surprisingly. Game sizes are growing much faster than the speeds of the internet. The interesting part is that the lack of speed in the US is due to companies being lazy MFers and just try to get more money, but that's a whole another issue for a completely different topic. |
Those users will eventually be left out, or will have to game on consoles or something more convenient. This isn't going to happen overnight obviously.
This whole DRM issue just seems to be where the PC gaming industry is moving as a whole since their bottom lines are effected much more than the console industry by piracy. Piracy has often been quoted as a reason for PC developers to start pushing towards consoles as a platform for their games. They look at the expansion of that market, they see how well the software is selling, and suddenly it looks like a viable solution.
But piracy is a 100% legitimate problem, to which no one has figured out a 100% acceptable solution.
The best solution so far has been direct to drive distribution services, slow network speeds or not. Growth in this sector says it's working.
By tying games to individual user accounts, it bypasses having an easily distributed piece of software that can be cracked and uploaded, eliminates the cost of production and shipping, and most importantly to software developers, it's a growing form of distribution that ultimately yields more returns per unit sold than hard media, while simultaneously eliminating the logistics of estimating how much to produce and distribute to each local market.
Again, hard media isn't going away any time soon, but I definitely see it becoming obsolete as a form of game distribution for the PC gaming platform first.
