Digital distribution, at least from personal experience, is a double-edged sword. While it’s certainly convenient to just buy games on demand from the comfort of your own home, cutting out a trip to a local retail store, there are still many of things about this new medium of buying games that should make consumers nervous. Is it worth the immediate gratification when faced with hurdles like bandwidth caps, constantly dwindling hard drive space, and the loss of resale? I’m not convinced; in fact, I’m rather nervous about the future of the industry in this regard.
Let’s look first at the one good thing that digital distribution offers: immediacy and escape from “Retail Hell.” Especially when it comes to new releases, it can be annoying to have to map out your day to include a trip to your local video game retailer of choice. Specialty retailers like GameStop and Game Crazy have become less appealing to consumers, due to the forced bombardment of pre-order and discount card sales pitches from each chain’s respective employees. Big box retailers make buying new releases a chore by getting new product out late– if they get certain games in at all. When you order online, that’s all well and good, but you still have to wait for the game to arrive via your selected shipping method and hope that it isn’t lost and damaged in transit.
Digital distribution does away with the survival missions and crossed fingers; the game is uploaded to each console’s “storefront,” you pay funds for the game, download it, and play it. Xbox 360 owners will be able to play Marvel vs. Capcom 2 this week without having to hunt down a copy at retail or pay an obscene amount for a pre-owned copy, for example… and because the game did see a prior retail release, consumers likely know what they’re getting before dropping their cash on it.
That leads me to my first big gripe about this new distribution model: No resale.
For as long as people have been playing console video games, there has been a market to recoup some of what you spent, if you were no longer using or didn’t like what you had bought. Before there was eBay and Craiglist, there were retail stores like Funcoland and Electronics Boutique that accepted trade-ins. Local independent gaming stores did the same. You also had the option of selling to a friend, co-worker, or familiy member. There were even tag sales and garage sales. These methods of reselling have helped to keep gaming as successful, despite a few bumps in the economic road over the past decades. It made some consumers, like myself, more apt to drop some extra cash on impulse purchases, because I knew that I was never really “stuck” with a game and would be able to recoup at least a few bucks of my initial purchase, either in cash or store credit.
Digital distribution however, has no resale value. If you buy it, you own it for as long as the online service operates. If you read decent reviews for a game, decide to take the plunge for $15, and win up hating it… that’s too damned bad. You have just lost your $15 with no recourse. Demos help to stem the issue of uncertainty a bit, but not all platforms offer timely demos of titles like these.
WiiWare is a classic example of this risk. You can splurge on Gradius Rebirth, but if you find it to be too difficult and can’t progress terribly far in the game, all you can do is delete it and chalk it up to a bad experience that sets you back $10. What happens when full games start seeing digital distribution? How angry will you be if you drop $50 on a game that you win up not liking and have no choice but to eat all of the cost? I can tell you that it would drastically change my buying habits; I’d be a lot less impulsive and the industry would see much less revenue from these kinds of consumers.
It’s easy to see why lack of resale makes publishers and developers happy. It’s no secret that publishers and developers share a collective dislike of the used games market. Of course, eliminating the used game market would force consumers to pony up $60+ for each new game, adding coins to the coffers of publishers and developers… but eliminating a practice that’s been observed for so long by expediting digital distribution isn’t the right way to go about it. All it will take is a few disappointing games from publishers to make consumers far more wary of what they spend money on. This move is far more punitive to the consumer than it is to chains like GameStop. You won’t be able to sell that game you no longer play. You’ll just delete it from your hard drive, and that’s the end of it.
Speaking of hard drives, that’s another issue that digital distribution presents: These games take up space. If you’re a collector, you’re going to run into problems with this very quickly. Even Microsoft’s 120GB hard drive fills up over time, and then it becomes a question of what to keep and what to delete, in order to make room for new purchases. The Wii had problems with storage space that were well-documented before a firmware update enabled the use of SD cards. I was forced to “clean the fridge” pretty often because some of my WiiWare and Turbo CD / Nintendo 64 games were large files that took up a ton of space.
Obviously, hard drive space is for storage; however, as digital distribution of more complex games becomes more prevalent, how many games will users be able to store without having to “clean the fridge” or spend more money on a larger hard drive? Ask PlayStation 3 owners about mandatory installs and owning a 20GB hard drive. Yhey’ll tell you that it’s no picnic having to pick and choose what to keep and what to temporarily delete. Granted, you can always download things again, but that leads me to the last big problem with digital distribution.
More and more internet service providers are instituting, or at least considering, bandwidth caps. Downloading video games can quickly eat bandwidth, especially if you download full retail games like Microsoft will be unveiling next month. Sony has already been doing this on a limited basis. Combine these large downloads with video and music streaming, e-mail, playing games online, and more… You’ll see that you use a lot more bandwidth that you thought you did. Even Comcast’s cap of 250GB, which seems high, may be close to being met at the end of a particularly release-heavy month. Are publishers going to work out arrangements with ISPs to expand these caps, or will we see a lot of finger-pointing amongst families that are rationing bandwidth? We can complain all we want about how “unfair” these caps may be, but don’t expect them to go anywhere unless a class-action suit succeeds.
It’s likely that, despite any concerns regarding the future of digital distribution and its implementation… it’s going to happen. The real story revolves around how consumers react to this new change and how the industry adjusts to that reaction. Will consumers be more careful with their downloading and buying habits? Will more quality games be made to make consumers forget about reselling? When will we see larger and more inexpensive hard drives, and how will bandwidth caps affect sales? The answers to all of these questions are unclear, but in an industry that’s been trending down and away from the apex of its popularity, these answers may hold the key to the future of console gaming for years to come.
