spemanig said:
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Steam fills very well the digital part of PC gaming market, but it can't replace physical market where connection speed is still low, and about this telcos are very clear, they won't ever invest more on broadband in scarcely populated areas, without governments investments countryside and some suburban areas will remain stuck to low speed, 640kbps if they're lucky in the country, less than 10Mbps in the suburbs. Even in the towns there still will be areas cut out of broadband, in my alley we remained out of the new fiber lines in the 90's and it will be the same even in the next years, unless we pay personally the works plus the obscenely high daily taxes the municipality charges on private citizens to dig public roads, even the smallest and worst served ones (there's just one reduced fee to dig up to ONE square meter for just ONE day, and it's still around 100 euros, it's barely enough if the plumber must repair a leak in the trait of your water pipe in public soil between the water meter and your property). Fully digital delivered contents devices will have to give up large parts of potential markets for another twenty years, because if so many badly served areas won't be reached by broadband even during this phase of major infrastructure works, they'll have to wait for the next one, in between only a small part will be reached if some lines will have to be replaced because they totally rotted.
Forget wireless connections, in most countries just downloading one game (a PC or console-sized game, that is, not tens MB-sized mobile games) would consume more than the monthly traffic available with most typical contracts, and some providers give extra no limits traffic, not accounted for in the general purpose traffic limit, only for subscribers of pay TV streaming services, and it's usable only for that purpose.
