cleveland124 said:
That's thinking in todays terms. The future is online. Yes, more and more games will go to digital only distribution. It cuts significant costs. There is no more guess work and having 500,000 copies of a game go unsold because you thought demand would be higher. Publishing costs push prices way up as well. It's been rumored that if a game sells for $60 the developer will only get $30. By going online, they will cut these costs substantially. You'll also sell to more individuals. For example the only way for me to share my wiiware games is to actually take my wii with me. So me and my friends that play will probably all have copies of the games we like versus having one copy and passing it around. Do to these digital downloads should be cheaper. It reminds me how credit card companies used to fight you transferring money from your bank account electriconically by charging you a fee. But having an individual open my mail, go through the companies controls to the check actually got cashed costs 10 times as much. So I would just send a check until they made online bank payment free. Eventually games will be distributed mainly online. Sure there will always be the Metal Gear Solids that would be insane to download and thus will be sold at retail. But 80% of the games can work with download. |
It makes more sense to go download only for many games, particularly the smaller budget games (ones that see on the game shelf for $10) just due to manufacturing and shipping costs.
If I'm paying that little for a game, odds are it won't be finished unless it's good (cheap and good is a rare combination). I won't feel obligated to "get my mileage" out of a budget game because I didn't pay $50 or $60 for that experience. So where does it end up? Recycle bin or trash if you have no intention of going back to it. Much more sense to just buy via download instead.
Multiply that by tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands if said game is mediocre enough to have tons of unsold inventory and the waste involved becomes evident.
So why are they even on retail shelves to begin with? Simple: visibility. Not everyone is online. Not everyone is savvy enough to be able to find their games online, even with services such as Steam available (pre-installed on HP computers, so no excuses there for HP owners, not that Steam has an all encompassing catalog of games).
Why sell downloads at the same price as physical media? Exactly for the reason stated previously: undercut MSRP prices enough to make downloads the preferred method of buying over brick and mortar retailers and they will cut back their orders in proportion to the percentage of sales they lose to cheaper download purchases. In extreme cases, they could decline to stock the game at all if sell volume was cut low enough to not make it worthwhile. Otherwise, their only market becomes those without net access (increasingly rare) or those who won't surrender physical media until you pry it from their cold dead hands.
There's really no difference to the gamer once the game is up and running. So the $4-5 that would have gone to a retailer goes to the game developer or publisher instead. Does it really matter?
Eventually, ALL games will be available via download (even the 50GB MGS4s of the world once networks robust enough to handle the bandwidth become common), but there will still be a market for physical media as inefficient and wasteful as it can be. The only losers in that future are the GameStops and EB Games of the world.
