Gamestop is to Steam what Blockbuster is to Netflix, they failed to adapt and now they're obsolete. Not only that, they also have a horrible track record for customer service. The internet is littered with tales of horrible experiences from Gamestop, and the only people who might still shop there are grandparents shopping for their grandkids.
It seems like most complaints about Gamestop aren't directed at customer service, as the employees are usually pretty nice, it's about the prices and policies. They'll buy a used game or take it as a trade in for next to nothing and then turn around and sell it at almost retail price. Lots of kids are basically throwing games away at Gamestop.
Add to that, the fact that a lot of stuff can't be resold these days. Special gear, hats for specific versions, one time registration codes, etc.
I'm all for buy low-sell high (I never sold because it wasn't worth the trade, but thats just me) - but buying from GameStop just leaves you with a gimp product.
A large part of that can't be blamed on GS. Developers are all after the PreSale bonus', DLC and anything that stops secondary sales.
As much as I love Steam, it is worrysome that I don't even have the option of reselling my games. (On the same token: I generally don't buy unless it's 50-75% off, so...)
I don't mind that fact that I can't sell Steam games, because the tradeoff is that I can download the game whenever I want and don't have to keep track of a physical copy.
They really need to pivot, and I'm not seeing them do it. To me the answer is obvious:
Blockbuster :: Netflix :: actual movie theatre
Old Gamestop :: Steam :: new gamestop with all but the rarest used games hauled away, & using the space for pod enclosures that create individual and co-op immersive experiences, rentable by the hour while parents shop at surrounding stores, run errands, etc.
Studios get immersive demos, suburban gamers have a new social activity, and gamestop continues to have a reason to exist.
The problem with your analogy is that while a movie can take two or three hours, a game can take dozens or hundreds, which means a lot more time spent in your "pod".
It's interesting to note, however, that a variation on this idea has already come and gone: arcades. Those were the places you went to when you wanted to play a game somewhere other than your home.
Arcades are a pretty interesting analogy to movie theaters. The reason theaters continue to exist, is that movies are released there first. Because they make more money there.
I wonder if games could release to arcades before releasing to the public. But somehow that doesn't seem quite as practical.
Probably, but Steam is in a growing business, not a dying one.
The argument is more that not only is Gamestop in a diminishing market, people won't even miss it because they have unpleasant memories of it. If Gamestop was this cool amazing video game community hub thing that I loved, I might go there, and end up buying games while I'm there anyways.
I think a harbinger of this was the fact that the latest console generation did not come with an upgrade in (physical) game medium.
Previously, each console generation came with newer cartridges, then with newer disc formats (CD, then DVD, then HD-DVD / Blu Ray). But this generation just stuck with Blu Ray. That signaled to me that this may very well be the last generation to even support physical media.
If this console generation lasts the typical ~7 years or so... do we expect people to still be using any physical media in the early 2020s?
I think the limiting factor is how much hard drive space you want to take up with coresident games. If you use a blue ray, you can load a significant amount of content from disk. Otherwise you're forcing your players to make tradeoffs based on how much space they have left which would cause first releases for a system to have a natural advantage over later releases (sales wise) as HDD space fills up.
Edit: Fair enough, it seems games are doing this already, so maybe this argument isn't as valid as it used to be.
The Xbox One (and the PS4 I think, although I don't own one so I'm not sure) doesn't let you play a game off its disc - you have to install it. The only functional differences between disc games and downloads is that you can sell/loan/trade/gift disc games via the physical media, and consequently the disc has to be inserted while playing as proof of continued ownership.
> If you use a blue ray, you can load a significant amount of content from disk.
It should be noted that most AAA games install themselves to disk anyways to help alleviate loading times (especially in the PS4's case, as Blu-Ray is sloooow)
I agree that the limiting factor is hard drive space. It would not have made sense to significantly increase the capacity of the drive by replacing Blu-Ray with something else. That would have just made the hard drive bottleneck even more pronounced.
Yeah, at their level of bulk purchasing, it wouldn't. Cost on a Blue ray drive, cost of discs packaging, etc... All put together they would save. But they got bitten pretty hard by the "how dare you not let me sell my old games" crowd. That seems to have deterred them from "download only" distribution.
It's also better to have games on an SSD because it's an even faster loading time than spinnys. I've got my games on a 500"GB" SSD and it's always the most full disk.
Although in good news the SSD disk storage sizes are only going up and the price is coming down, so by the next console generation it should be practical to put in a 1TB SSD into a cheap console.
I'm not that sure that's the limiting factor these days. If Sony/Microsoft/Steam can be trusted to remember what I have in my library, I only need enough space to store the set of games I'm currently interested in. And with sufficient bandwidth, I can swap that set around very easily. Especially if I can control what I have installed via a mobile device -- think I might want to play a game tonight? Kick it off during my lunch hour, and it's ready and waiting when I get home.
Are you talking about just Sony consoles? Because otherwise your observation is false: Microsoft Xbox One, for example, got an upgrade from DVD to BluRay as same as did Wii. And in previous generations both did not get any upgrades.
The reason Sony upgrades media on its consoles is that Sony is a holding that also holds companies developing the said media and companies distributing movies/music on the same media. It's a cross-promotion.
I think you're right that the consoles missed a chance to upgrade the medium. Since disc access is so terribly slow, the disk is a sneaker-net. If the disk was a small fast SSD (which is a nice stable operating mode) or even like CompactFlash at least it would provide some physical value.
The problem is it's a cost center. And downloading will always be more convenient. Connections are easily fast enough to transfer the static data.
> If this console generation lasts the typical ~7 years or so... do we expect people to still be using any physical media in the early 2020s?
This insane upgrade cycle will disappear. Steam Machines will hopefully increase competition in consoles market and will push MS and Sony to upgrade their hardware more frequently.
I wasn't expecting the PS4 or XBone to have any media drive, just a hdd and wireless/wired internet connection.
Guess we're still a little ways away from that. I remember using Steam when it was new for HL2. I cracked open a beer to enjoy while it downloaded, happy i didn't have to drive for a half hour or so to pick up a copy at gamestop.
I had good broadband. However, it took all day and evening until around 2-3 AM for it to finish downloading. Things were over saturated i guess. I didn't re-use steam until a decade later since it left such a poor impression with their one 33.6 modem uploading the game to everyone.
I really hope digital downloads will take over. It will reduce the influence of retail distributors who like to set skewed regional pricing that in result affects even prices in digital stores. It is often simply a rip off (ask Australians what they think about it).
Surprisingly, that didn't quite happen yet. Some games like the Witcher 3 reported[1] a major percentage to be retail sales (almost 75%). I expected it to be way lower already.
There are lots of people on capped satellite/3G/"water tower" internet who enjoy gaming that are going to be cut out of the market if consoles go to a pure digital distribution system. Additionally, gamers in very remote locations (submarines, remote foreign villages, etc) couldn't have the latest releases mailed to them. Somehow they'd have to find a broadband connection. It doesn't make much sense to eliminate a class of paying customers by switching to 100% digital distribution.
It's a "problem" even for people on wired net connections.
I've got ~10/1 ADSL (nominally 8 megabits on a good day). This console generation is really testing the limits of my bandwidth - Halo 5 is 60+ GB, and it doesn't help when you've got errors like http://www.iinet.net.au/status/4438711 happening. 60GB would take 16 hours which is overnight-and-a-bit.
Unfortunately the One is not fault tolerant at all. I'll turn it on in the morning and it won't have started at all (despite having the settings right for "download while in low power mode).
I can't imagine using the Xbox One as a download-only console if you're on anything less than true unlimited data (I did 400GB of XBox/Netflix content alone last month).
I should put this in a blog post at some point but I'm seeing this more and more from Microsoft and Google - assume everyone's on 100MB+ connections.
e.g.
* OneDrive has no LAN sync, placeholder files have been removed so you can't even have your files available "on demand"
* Google removing SD card support left right and centre.
> It's a "problem" even for people on wired net connections
Legacy DSL is indeed a problem for that. High end games (and PC ones are even more so than console ones) are huge.
As I wrote below - DRM free games can solve this with services which will just ship you a game on flash storage on demand. DRMed ones however (and most current consoles are sick with DRM) would have an issue with such method. Your option could be ditching such consoles and sticking to DRM-free games and platforms.
Some niche retailers will surely remain for those who have very limited or no Internet connection. But they'll be serving a small market, and it will be quite different from current situation when retail distributors dictate prices for digital stores.
And it's indeed easy to make it a service on demand, when they get the digital game and ship it to you on a small flash drive. It's not a problem for DRM-free games, and may be GOG can even start offering such service in the future. DRMed games however shoot themselves in the foot by making it too hard, but I personally don't care about them.
It seems like shipping the game on SD or MicroSD cards ought to work for a lot of those situations. 4-8 GB SD cards are about down to the price point where you are paying for the packaging and the shelf-space, rather than the actual product. Big, clunky, spinning, easily damaged optical media should be dying.
Skewed regional pricing is caused by retail distributors having too much influence. Most often they print physical media and distribute it in their region. And if percentage of such sales is high, they can dictate pricing to game studios. And often they set those prices high, and also require to sign a contract, that same game distributed anywhere digitally should have same regional uneven pricing.
Pure digital distribution takes retailers out of the equation (or even if majority of sales are digital, retailers don't have strong influence anymore), and developers can easily set prices any way they want - for instance one flat price everywhere if they wish.
Now, if only we could get rid of the DRM infesting the games industry like they did with music. It's seriously ridiculous that you can't get a refund for or resell downloaded games. The plastic disk doesn't fundamentally change anything, and they know it, otherwise they'd charge less for digital versions.
I don't think it's entirely ridiculous that you can't resell an item that never degrades. If this was possible, it would be a huge blow to publishers. Imagine a new game being released on PS4 for $60. A good number of people buy the game at release, play it through and then put it up on a marketplace at a lower price. At this time, there is zero incentive for a buyer to get it from PlayStation store since he will get the exact same product in either case.
I say this as a gamer who exclusively buys digital downloads these days. Would I like to be able to resell downloaded games? Yes. I just don't think it's realistic.
> I don't think it's entirely ridiculous that you can't resell an item that never degrades.
Thats an argument for protectionism, but not for consumer benefit. In fact it feels like the opposite -- using IP law to force consumers to pay more for the exact same product that could be bought "used."
Steam has a somewhat reasonable refund policy: http://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/ . And most online purchases are made with credit cards, and those usually have strong consumer protections. You could always do a chargeback if the game launch was really bad (SimCity, Dayz). Also, a lot of credit cards have return polices where you can get refunds for any reason within 60 days of purchase.
There are numerous horror stories about people issuing a charge-back on a Steam purchase and having Steam respond by permanently disabling their account (invariably filled with $3000 worth of games).
Until quite recently this was official Valve policy, even if the game was defective. I had to explain the policy to American Express to get them to threaten Valve so I could get a refund on a game that had broken DRM (Securom).
That is a relatively recent development though - I think only about a year.
I hope it is being used to incentivize publishers to fix their shit before release, rather than dumping buggy, broken, incomplete trash on their captive pre-orders.
Most of my Steam orders are sale items, so my calculus is that it really only has to give me as much enjoyment as the equally costly big coffee at Starbucks for it to be worthwhile, and that's a low bar.
There has to be a line somewhere. Otherwise you endorse rampant silliness like "oh, I didn't like the artistic decisions involved in the end of Mass Effect 3 after I played thirty hours of it, I want my money back."
Two hours of play is already a longer return period than most physical game retailers have offered.
They can't charge less for the digital version because of gamestop. Gamestop won't carry games where the digital version is cheaper. There might also be similar arrangements with the console makers themselves, not wanting to encourage the PC market. Games made only for PC are cheaper and have better sales.
As for reselling games, that would seriously hurt developers. A single game could be resold 100s of times, but only the first sale goes to the developer, and everyone else in the chain plays for free.
This is called the doctrine of first sale, and it's been fine for physical products since forever. (The maker of the chair only makes money on the first sale of the chair, everyone else plays for "free") If you're going to say " But information products don't degrade", I'll note that a product degrading is not a condition of the first sale doctrine. You can sell your mint condition Mickey Mantle card, without giving a cut to Tops
Well chairs really are different than software. Most of the value of a chair comes from the labor and resources put into producing it.
Software takes 0 effort and 0 resources to produce more copies. All of the cost comes from the initial development. The actual disks or bandwidth for downloads costs pennies.
So when you sell a chair, you aren't decreasing the quality of future chairs in any way. Fewer chairs bought, just means there will be fewer chairs made the next year. Maybe a single chair maker will lose his job. Which sucks for him. But he really isn't needed because the world doesn't need more chairs.
With software, less demand means less quality. When you get less sales, then the budget for the next video game will be less and less. Fewer niche games will be made because the budget gets too small to support them.
Even though the demand is theoretically there - there are enough gamers willing to spend money on such a game to support it. The problem is it creates a free rider problem where no one wants to be the one to pay for it, when they can just free ride off of used games and not spend a dime.
Second, the very important difference is time sensitivity. Games get the majority of their sales in the first month, and it slowly declines after that. If everyone sells used, then all of the sales after the first month don't matter. So the vast majority of their income is lost.
> As for reselling games, that would seriously hurt developers. A single game could be resold 100s of times, but only the first sale goes to the developer, and everyone else in the chain plays for free.
Video games have been resold since video games were invented and there still continue to be new titles.
And it has always hurt developers. Games could be cheaper or have larger budgets without Gamestop taking such a huge cut.
The worrying thing about digital is it could be vastly easier to trade used games. There is no worrying about scratched discs, and you don't get pennies on the dollar for the trade. You could just play used games endlessly without ever spending more than an initial investment.
They are already cheap and have AAA games have budgets comparable to mid-tier Hollywood movies. Not being able to sell something you bought seems strange to me.
I said cheaper and larger. And that goes especially for smaller games. PC indie games would probably hurt the worst from this. Since I imagine there are far more used copies floating around than people actually playing them. When supply is greater than demand, the price goes towards zero.
It's not really strange, it's been this way for years. When have you ever been able to sell software you downloaded? Neither Apple or Google let you sell used apps, steam has never allowed used game sales, etc.
And it makes way more sense this way. You are not buying a physical object that took labor and resources to produce. A physical object that would go to waste otherwise. You are buying a bunch of bits which can be copied endlessly. There's no depreciation over time, no downside to buying used over new. No personal attachment to a specific object when you can just download it again when you want to play it. No middlemen to take a cut out of the trade so that you can just buy and sell it at exactly the same price.
That should work both ways then. Games are $60 digital or physical, by your logic they should be way cheaper digital. Game studios can't have it both ways.
As I said, they are. Games made for PC are way cheaper and have way more/better sales.
The reason multi-platform games aren't cheaper on PC, is because Gamestop or console makers have contracts that prevent it. If you put your game on PC at a lower price, they will stop selling it.
Well actually it kind of is. Developer income determines the number, budget, and price of games made. If you want more, better, cheaper games, then you basically need to maximize the amount of money developers can get from those games. Money fuels these furnaces.
Not really. The article states publishers are doing great. It's the brick and mortar stores that are threatened by digital distribution. I think using HMV for music or Blockbuster for video is a better analogy
I am surprised by how bad the Store is on the Xbox One. I did not find much there, and the interface, oh wow it is so bad. Then the servers start crapping out and simple local games fall over, sync issues, just all sorts of problems. It has not been a smooth experience, but even still I'm thinking, what's the point of getting in a car and driving to a store? There needs to be a reason to go there other than because disks are physical media. But the store will have to radically transform to serve a purpose.
As for reselling games, this just gives any game with online content tied to an account an inherent advantage. Charging every user can be done with or without physical media. If the static data itself commands a price, probably you are doing it wrong. You want people to pass that around for free as a favor.