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Forums - Gaming - Next gen: Will it go all digital?

 

What medium will consoles use next gen?

Retail, partially digital 46 64.79%
 
All digital, with retail 19 26.76%
 
Only digital 1 1.41%
 
Only one console will go all digital 3 4.23%
 
Only two consoles will go all digital 2 2.82%
 
Total:71
superchunk on 20 March 2012

It will be more digital than this gen, but all three will still offer retail based games on some sort of physical media. I'm hoping that the rumor with MS is true and it moves to carts... of course this will hurt backwards compatibility with the 360. But, I think they will do something with digital downloading to make that unimportant.

Nintendo and Sony will remain with disc based as Sony will include a bluray player since it still makes them money and Nintendo will have some modified disc to help with BC to Wii.



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Claymore on 20 March 2012
Chark said:
Claymore said:
bouzane said:
Exia said:
There is still no incentive for consumers to go digital.
With cable/isp companies wanting impose caps in the usa/canada. It will make consumers think twice in dling stuff over the net.
Not to mention not everyone has high speed internet. Games can take 2-3 days to download, why not go out and buy it.
Also no price incentives, publishers are saving from "disc/packing/shipping/retailing" and nothing is transfer to the consumers. No thanks,


It's a terrible shame that the consoles and handhelds have such laughable digital prices when compared to just about any digital distributor on the PC.


PC is just as bad, most PC games apart from the Indie stuff I can get a physical copy £5-10 cheaper on Amazon than services like Steam ETC.

That's why the Vita store is so interesting. Not all, but most titles have a 10% discount available online. Will the online prices drop when retail prices do? That's hard to say. I would hope so. Atleast a digital library will have games available after they aren't available new in stores.


To be honest I don't trust publishers enough to buy retail games digitally.



bouzane on 20 March 2012
Claymore said:
bouzane said:
Exia said:
There is still no incentive for consumers to go digital.
With cable/isp companies wanting impose caps in the usa/canada. It will make consumers think twice in dling stuff over the net.
Not to mention not everyone has high speed internet. Games can take 2-3 days to download, why not go out and buy it.
Also no price incentives, publishers are saving from "disc/packing/shipping/retailing" and nothing is transfer to the consumers. No thanks,


It's a terrible shame that the consoles and handhelds have such laughable digital prices when compared to just about any digital distributor on the PC.


PC is just as bad, most PC games apart from the Indie stuff I can get a physical copy £5-10 cheaper on Amazon than services like Steam ETC.


I bought Mass Effect for $4.99 and Mass Effect 2 for $6.24 (no tax). I rarely have to pay more than $5 for a disc-based game through Steam due to the fantastic sales. The most I ever paid for a game purchased digitally was Portal 2 for $9.99. I use several other sites (greenmangaming, gog, etc...) and only buy games that are on sale. Just yesterday I saw that Human Revolution was $12.49 on greenmangaming and decided to wait for a better sale before purchasing it.



Claymore on 20 March 2012
bouzane said:
Claymore said:
bouzane said:
Exia said:
There is still no incentive for consumers to go digital.
With cable/isp companies wanting impose caps in the usa/canada. It will make consumers think twice in dling stuff over the net.
Not to mention not everyone has high speed internet. Games can take 2-3 days to download, why not go out and buy it.
Also no price incentives, publishers are saving from "disc/packing/shipping/retailing" and nothing is transfer to the consumers. No thanks,


It's a terrible shame that the consoles and handhelds have such laughable digital prices when compared to just about any digital distributor on the PC.


PC is just as bad, most PC games apart from the Indie stuff I can get a physical copy £5-10 cheaper on Amazon than services like Steam ETC.


I bought Mass Effect for $4.99 and Mass Effect 2 for $6.24 (no tax). I rarely have to pay more than $5 for a disc-based game through Steam due to the fantastic sales. The most I ever paid for a game purchased digitally was Portal 2 for $9.99. I use several other sites (greenmangaming, gog, etc...) and only buy games that are on sale. Just yesterday I saw that Human Revolution was $12.49 on greenmangaming and decided to wait for a better sale before purchasing it.



Using your examples here in the UK you can get.

Human Revolution for £2.99 from Amazon, steam it's £29.99 greenmangaming it's £25.97....

Mass effect £6 Amazon Steam £10 Steam £9 greenmangaming.



bouzane on 20 March 2012
Claymore said:
bouzane said:
Claymore said:
bouzane said:
Exia said:
There is still no incentive for consumers to go digital.
With cable/isp companies wanting impose caps in the usa/canada. It will make consumers think twice in dling stuff over the net.
Not to mention not everyone has high speed internet. Games can take 2-3 days to download, why not go out and buy it.
Also no price incentives, publishers are saving from "disc/packing/shipping/retailing" and nothing is transfer to the consumers. No thanks,


It's a terrible shame that the consoles and handhelds have such laughable digital prices when compared to just about any digital distributor on the PC.


PC is just as bad, most PC games apart from the Indie stuff I can get a physical copy £5-10 cheaper on Amazon than services like Steam ETC.


I bought Mass Effect for $4.99 and Mass Effect 2 for $6.24 (no tax). I rarely have to pay more than $5 for a disc-based game through Steam due to the fantastic sales. The most I ever paid for a game purchased digitally was Portal 2 for $9.99. I use several other sites (greenmangaming, gog, etc...) and only buy games that are on sale. Just yesterday I saw that Human Revolution was $12.49 on greenmangaming and decided to wait for a better sale before purchasing it.



Using your example here in the UK you can get Human Revolution for £2.99 from Amazon, steam it's £29.99 greenmangaming it's £25.97....


Again, I said sale prices. There really is no reason to ever purchase anything that is not on sale when using a service such as Steam. That being said, £2.90 for the game plus £4.60 for delivery is about the same price I could have paid yesterday. I'm actually shocked that the price of a physical copy is comperable to a digital copy. That being said, I viewed the greenmangaming sale as far too expensive. I'll buy Human Revolution later this year, likely for $4.99 Canadian, tax free.

 

Edit: I would have been playing my game later that night instead of waiting weeks for it to arrive in the mail. Also, greenmangaming has a sort of return policy in which some of their games can be deactivated in order to receive credit towards further purchases. Finally, discs can be scratched and the manuals offered with PC games are typically non-existent, usually a single page.



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Chark on 20 March 2012
TruckOSaurus said:
I think a digital only console is still far away. For next gen, I think we'll see more games distributed digitally. Going all digital would be commercial suicide.


That's what I said, imagine what would happen if only one console, or two even, went all digital. The company that didn't would practicly own all game stores. It would be devestating.



Before the PS3 everyone was nice to me :(

Chark on 20 March 2012
spurgeonryan said:
I already only play 1-3 games a month. If they go digital then it will probably be one new game a month. Maybe.

I like buying games at the store and having the instruction manual to quickly glance through and never look at again. Then there is the CD that when scratched is almost worthless so you need to rebuy it. What they should do is include a digital copy with it for when the inevitable does happen and your game is unusable.

As for this threads question. It seems that it could end up like that. GAME is going under, Used games are selling like hotcakes, and people love downloading anything they can download. Even the wii U is rumored via Xxains thread to have a ton of big downloadable games coming out with its launch. Still, a lot of traditional boxed games are selling well in stores and online, so I doubt it will be this generation. Feel free to have digital copies available to people though for a cheaper price.


Lol, that's why I've always been super careful with my game discs. My FFVII ended up with some scratches on disk two but I could work through it locking up at one point in the game...this is before someone stole it from me. That was back before it was on PSN for $10. I really like the blu ray discs as they are much more scratch resistant than dvds and especially cds



Before the PS3 everyone was nice to me :(

sperrico87 on 20 March 2012

It won't go all-digital until we reach a point where near 100% of console owners have their system connected to the internet. As far as I know, many systems are still in the 60-70% connected range. Still got a ways to go. So all three next-gen consoles will need a disc drive, or suffer a fate similar to that of the PSP Go, albeit to a lesser extent.



 

Cold Light on 20 March 2012
Chark said:

I like it, this thing is the most likely and good scenario. Both markets should complement each other. I use digital ditsribution as well as retail, but personally prefer retail much more because a lot of reasons.




 

TheKoreanGuy on 20 March 2012

The world isn't ready for digital only. The retailers will also make sure that doesn't happen.