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TheKoreanGuy on 20 March 2012
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superchunk said:
TheKoreanGuy said:

But retailers are still selling physical copies and that's not going to change anytime soon. Do you think the future is Gamestop or Best Buy with racks of paper slips with codes on them and nothing else? The only way this would work is if MS, Sony, and Nintendo kill their sales through retailers and opt to sell everything through the consoles themselves. But like I said, retailers won't like that and will make sure this doesn't happen.

Yeah, I understand that digital only would benefit both us and the company. But we're not there yet. Realistically, people won't go out to stores so they can buy things digital only. There would also be the problem of returning your games back as all sales would be final. That's why I think retailers will continue to fight for the option of physical copies. And again, the only viable solution for digial only would be through your actual console like Steam does with PC or the App store, which retailers would be fully against.

No, I see large retailers like Walmart having areas where sales of digital codes can be purchased etc and game centric places like Gamestop sellign the same thing plus accessories and consoles themselves. All the while other revenue for game sales is shifted to their already existing online models.

Granted, over time Gamestop and others will have to shrink their retail store footprint as game sales move to digital. In the end they will survive, with slightly a different format.

Look what's happened to music. Music stores still exist as does music in retailers. However, the biggest sale of music now is clearly digital and all retailers offer a digital options for download.

It didn't destroy the industry and retailers are still viable. Now with larger and cheaper storage, this will move to the complete loss of CDs as well as the migration of video to primarily digital delivery, same as music. Of course the next to follow will be games.

Again, I don't think it will happen 100% this next gen, but it will be dramatically increased and it will probably be the last gen with any cart/disc format option once these digital deliver systems are prefected over the next 5 years.

The thing with music though is they are small in size and relatively easy to download. Apple was able to use this to their advantage and completely change the way we buy music and we can see this similar business strategy with the Appstore. Games are large and probably will increase even more in size as we go beyond into next gen. I think our internet infrastructure is just not ready yet. I feel like MS, Sony, and Nintendo realize this but are also fully aware they need that profit margin. The reason the Appstore works as digital only is because we can even use something like 3G to download these bite-size games. Not even the PSVita can use 3G to download its games. The bandwitch caps on our internet is limiting the potential of digital only games.

You're right though. This will probably happen sometime eventually. But not for a good long while. If retailers already lost music, then they would be even more unwilling to lose games. I would assume retailers make more money from physical sales than digital sales so they will keep pushing for them for as long as they can. Most gamers also favor physical copies as well, especially for a home console. I can see dedicated gaming handhelds going digital only much earlier than home consoles, that is if dedicated gaming handhelds can continue to live (which I hope they do).