Are you ready to go entirely digital?

[CDiablo]

thranx said:

 

not going to pick a part the whole post, but steam for the PC says hello. You are assuming that pricing will stay the samne with DD, Why would it? It is a cheaper distribution method that cuts out a whole share of someones profit (retailers) leaving more room for price adjustments.

You are right about the higher profit margins and if Bethsheda makes more off of my $10 digital purchase than that of a $60 retail purchase more power to them. Fun fact about steam is that MSRP of PC games(from $50-$60) has gone up as Steam has become more successful. Im comparing pricing on XBL and how people will take that model over the Steam model because I feel that the majority of game companies are owned by people that want to squeeze as much money as they can out of the consumer. Look at XBL games, the majority see one weeklong %50 off sale in its lifetime but never a price drop. Look at the greatest/platinum hits in stores for XB/PS3 the MSRP of those games are ussually $30. This is how the DD structure, especially on consoles will be. Dont like the price, save up or go fuck yourself. Theres no competition for recieving your digital goods for your Xbox/Sony products like there is in the pc market. As companies make their own DD managers for their games(Steam-Valve, Origin-EA, Battle.Net-Activision/Blizzard) the pricing structures will be more like XBL. Look at Starcraft 2. Other than a week long price drop to $30 over this christmas season there has been no real sales for it because there is no other way for anyone to own it. This can work for a game like Starcraft due to the huge community, but Starcraft will never sell 1/5 of what Starcraft 1 did.

As stated in numerous used games threads boxes, manuals and resale are features of a product. When people lose that feature the value of the item goes down. Can a company make more money by selling a game at $30-$40 on DD as opposed to a $60 retail, I dont know but its the fact that the majority of gamers arent wise to content liscensing/DD. I know plenty of more "casual' gamers that feel burned by the way XBLA games work for a number of reasons because they dont fully understand the DD concept. As people wise up to it the value of content liscenses or the willingness to pay "full price" is going to drop dramatically. As games sell less and companies stay hard headed about their prices IPs, studios and new ideas will die and the gaming market will shrink. I hope I am wrong, I really do.