| mrstickball said: Also, you must remember: if digital distribution wasn't important, or useful, why is Itunes and VG download services like Gametap, Steam or Stardock so popular? |
iTunes is popular because it caters specifically to a media format where portability is not just seen as a convenience, but a must. A single CD is less portable than a media player that can hold 1000 CDs.
Gametap and Steam are popular because they're on the PC format, where storage space is cheap enough to be irrelevant. HDD storage space is getting to the point where you can buy it for a quarter per gigabyte.
Both are popular because they offer a cheaper, more convenient alternative to physical media. An average CD on iTunes costs $10-$12, as opposed to $15-$17 for a CD at your local brick-and-mortar. A month of Gametap is much cheaper than it would cost you to buy all of the games that you're downloading.
Now consider this proposal from MS. The 360 isn't portable, so it's no problem to keep physical media around. Storage space on the 360 is at a premium, as the proprietary hard drives are pretty overpriced. And, even putting aside the (inflated) cost of the 120gb hard drive, the downloads themselves actually cost more than the average secondary market value for these games.
That leaves convenience as a benefit. And even then, is it so much trouble to take a 10 minute drive to your nearest Gamestop?
"'Casual games' are something the 'Game Industry' invented to explain away the Wii success instead of actually listening or looking at what Nintendo did. There is no 'casual strategy' from Nintendo. 'Accessible strategy', yes, but ‘casual gamers’ is just the 'Game Industry''s polite way of saying what they feel: 'retarded gamers'."
-Sean Malstrom
