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MTZehvor on 17 March 2016
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Blob said:
MTZehvor said:

State it all you want; it doesn't change that numerous articles published by sources such as Forbes, Game Sync, and Huffington Post all cite studies showing that developers are becoming more and more hesitant to produce large scale copies of physical games. NPD physical sales have been down by significant amounts (17% in 2014) over the past two years, while digital sales have been rising dramatically (23% over the same time span).

The problem with your assertion is that the majority of gamers (and Americans who would be capable of affording video games) do have internet capable of downloading 50GB games. And as time passes and higher quality internet becomes more affordable, that number will only continue to rise. And, honestly, it doesn't even need to be a majority of gamers. As soon as enough people have high speed internet to the point where the loss in sales from the physical only crowd are overtaken by the costs for physical publishing (or splitting revenue with a publisher if you don't publish yourself), then digital gaming will be here to stay, with physical largely reduced to special editions and the likes. We're already seeing this with some small yet relatively well established titles like Ace Attorney and Elite Dangerous. And PC gaming has already largely become this with large distributors like Steam.

 

America is not the world though. Digital only can stifle the growth of the industry by limiting not only current but potential audiences.

Will there be a majority digital future, most likely evenyually, but i imagine not as soon as you'd think. the pro digital crowd who are already sold on it often forget about everyone else because it works for them. 

While that's true, America lags behind the rest of the developed world in terms of citizens who have fast internet, particularly the Western Europe video game market, Australia, and Japan, largely because unlike those areas, the US's internet market functions much more like an oligopoly, which keeps prices from being lowered as easily by competition. Telecom companies have also made a habit of splitting up regions in the US and focusing on them exclusively as opposed to trying to compete in other areas, whereas in many European countries such as Britain, governments force telecom companies to rent out their infrastructure for smaller companies to use in order to reduce barrier to entry and encourage competition.

My point in all of this is that while America is not the entire world, when it comes to the video game market that developers are interested in appealing to, they are as far behind as anyone out there. Will it limit audiences? Sure, to some extent, but it also eliminates publisher fees, and the audiences it would be losing from the rest of the world are generally ones that don't play video games. From a developers' standpoint, especially when you're likely to have to meet strict censorship standards in order to have your games published in a certain area (like China, for example), it's probably a smarter business decision to simply focus on areas you know your game can sell reasonably well in and follow a more cost effective method than continue to use a more expensive business model for the sake of appealing to a very unknown crowd.