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Forums - Sales - digital distribution’s “neither as big nor as significant” as consoles

sinha on 16 July 2009

Edery stated that without an “Amazon-like recommendation engine, user ratings, ease of search and more dynamic pricing functionality allowing selective discounts and bundling, the long tail on digital download services will struggle to grow”, according to Gamasutra, and the “long tail” is incompatible with many multiplayer titles.

“The number of players in an ecosystem is crucial to a real-time multiplayer game’s success,” he said. “There are too many multiplayer games and too few players populating them. Why would a user buy a real-time multiplayer game from the long tail if they won’t have anyone else to play it with?”

Edery suggested that a viral invitation scheme would help with longevity, allowing players to invite friends to play a game for free, implementing a better matchmaking system with information, or to schedule playtimes for games like Microsoft is doing with 1vs. 100.

 

Those are all really good points.  I'm glad the XBLA people are thinking about those things, and hopefully changes will be implemented.

 

 

This, on the other hand, makes no sense and I really doubt it's true: "The hits get bigger, but the pool of money remains the same"

 



We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that they [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine and half years? It's a learning process. - SCEI president Kaz Hirai

It's a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they're like, "Oh my God that's so cool, I'm gonna go buy it." So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they've showed it to someone else who then go out and buy it and so on. Everyone I know bought one and nobody turns it on. - Epic Games president Mike Capps

We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games. - Activision CEO Bobby Kotick

 

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mrstickball on 18 July 2009

sinha - This guy is the FORMER portfolio manager for XBLA.

Fun fact: I interviewed with Microsoft to take over his position a year ago :-p
I think things have changed since he was the portfolio manager. I agree with some of what he's saying about a recommendation engine. I guess my question is why he didn't push for it as part of NXE.



Back from the dead, I'm afraid.

Sardauk on 20 July 2009

Some developers are enthousiast about it :

 

"It's a complete no-brainer," admits Team17's commercial director Martyn Brown. "Even selling it at a much lower price, we're making twice as much money than if we put it out as a boxed product and charged three times as much. There's no stupidly expensive marketing campaign to pay for, no distribution fees, no retail margin, no pre-owned resale losses, and no publisher slice. We've cut them all out entirely." With the success of numerous Worms ports swelling the coffers, it's a risk the veteran company can afford to take."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/alien-breed-evolution-hands-on



 

Evan Wells (Uncharted 2): I think the differences that you see between any two games has much more to do with the developer than whether it’s on the Xbox or PS3.

MonstaMack on 20 July 2009

It doesn't matter if people think digitial distribution isn't great, or not selling as well. Why? As stated above it saves the developers money, and some developers end up in the red (Take two anyone? Midway? Acclaim? THQ (till Undisputed) etc.) because of insane costs, but digital distribution cuts that loss down a lot. If anything Gamestop is going to have to change their store in the next twenty years or make amendments because the used market isn't going to be around forever.



It's just that simple.