Full Steam Ahead: How Digital Will Kill the Disc

[mad825]

The end is neigh!

I couldn't help but think that if I'd downloaded all these games, storage space and shipping would cost me $0

I don't know where to begin to explain how stupid this statement is.

Okay, it costs money to maintain servers, so how do all these digital retailers get the money for it? How do they even make a profit? The answer is the games are sold at a slightly more expensive price. I will say this again and again till I go blue, there are cheaper alternatives like Amazon and hell you can get real physical goods with your pre-orders instead of some digital silly hat.

Games sold on Steam are not cheap, in fact, the only time they are cheap is when there's a big sale. New PC games cost £30? haha, Amazon does it for £25-27 including delivery. Also, drops are consistent with places like Amazon instead of temporary drops and hikes in prices.

I got DNF for 3 fucking quid brand new off Amazon yet steam sales it for £7.49 (with the 50% off).

 

[Lightknight]

I hope everyone knows that you can stack or pack the disks elsewhere and just get rid of the boxes, right? Am I the only person who took one of those writeable CD containers and just stacked all my pc games in there? I just stacked them alphabetically. My brother got a cd case that was like a book with four CDs per page front and also organized them alphabetically. Very nice and easy to search. Even kept the cd keys in the pockets. If anyone is reading this and are having the same problem, please consider such a purchase.

It's the boxes that are giving you trouble and cardboard belongs in recycling or in the fireplace. Not on a shelf unless it's particularly noteworthy.

But yeah, the future is digital downloads from sources that maintain your library. It'll be funny that I grew up with physical media formats. Records then Tape/vhs then CD then DVD. I suppose now it's HDDs and such with internet access to said content. Remarkable.

 

[Nurb]

Game companies have proven they want to take away ownership of games and turn gaming into a "service", which EA has already tried to do in EU courts, so they're pushing harder for Digital-only because they can control it easier.

Xboned's DRM tried to kill ownership with the end of personal gaming libraries that required accounts and server check-ins to play them, meaning servers being taken offline or a new generation will cause you to lose access to the games you paid too much money for.

Digital distribution could work in in theory, but in reality a few people really screw it up for everyone who isn't a corporate suit.

So the physical will not die until digital can be guaranteed to be ownable and storable for play 20 years down the road... Otherwise digital-only is the death of gaming as we know it.

 

[Vigormortis]

Frankly? This whole discussion is moot.

Why does there have to be a disconnect between physical discs and digital downloads?

I mean, save for a few Xbox360 titles, all of my game purchases since 2007 have been digital. Yet, every single one of them are currently stored on physical formats.

Every time I buy a game on Steam, or GoG, or any other DD service, I immediately install it to an external drive. And, with some titles, I further back them up onto DVDs.

My point is: Just because you're not physically buying a disc in a store, it doesn't mean you can't actually have the game on a disc.

In fact, if you don't backup your digital downloads you're being irresponsible. And, are just asking for trouble.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I'm perfectly content with digital-only. I have no issue with paying $20-$50 on a collection of digital files. Especially when one considers that, in reality, that is all you're getting when you buy a disc.

 

[william12123]

While you are right vigormortis, it doesnt solve the main problem, which is that the games will be unusable without the game company at the other end. I backup all the GOG/indie games I can, but steam games? I cant play them without steam anyway, so I dont see the point. Heck, even steam offline mode doesnt work if you dont have the "latest version of the game". But ya, it's hard to be against "digital only" when even the physical copies (DVD) wont work without the server at the other end. I think the newest game I have on disk without DRM is the first Assassins Creed. Everything else needs some sort of web connection.

And I'm getting the impression (from mad825) that amazon uk must be much more generous that amazon canada. I've not seen many strong amazon sales for disc based stuff (for PC anyway). Sigh.

 

[chozo_hybrid]

Why can't we just have both! I'm getting bored of this debate, because until the infrastructure is really there, most people in the world won't be able to use digital as a means to get everything.

 

[Holythirteen]

The statistics I just looked up seemed to say that in north america, there is 25-30 broadband subscriptions for every 100 people, and everybody else gets the truck driver's salute? Ya, I don't see it. Not anytime soon, especially not for 40 gig games, that shit would take me 7 hours to download, and I live in a major city with upgraded internet.

Don't get me wrong, I love my digital library of games(PC, PSN, XBL), but I think I can count the number of titles that are bigger than 2 gigs on one hand. It's just not worth it, if they'd give me a bigger hard drive with my consoles, maybe I would've impulse-bought a few more titles, but I don't expect they'll ever include a hard drive that holds more than 8 full titles of varying size comfortably. Obviously I'm not playing 8 games even within a three-month period, but if I ever want to go back and play one of those old games, that's a 3 - 7 hour download I have to sit through... or I could just dig out the disc. Hmmmm... tough call... :/

Yeah if I lived in a tiny place in Hong Kong, and shared this space with 3+ people, I might change my tune. But like others have already said, laws haven't caught up with technology, and companies haven't really either. So inevitable seems a long ways off.

Okay, it costs money to maintain servers, so how do all these digital retailers get the money for it? How do they even make a profit? The answer is the games are sold at a slightly more expensive price.

Sorry, that's just a lie that big companies like to tell people. Its to make people feel better for paying full price for a digital copy.

I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure even a monster server doesn't cost as much as renting a small kiosk in a mall or something and paying for staff. When you factor in how many more customers that server can sell to, the price is pretty insignificant.

But keep in mind that just made your argument that much stronger.

 

[IamGamer41]

There will always always always be people who want physical copies of their games. Sure digital is all well and good. Like if you have a house fire that wipes out all your games, It be nice to have a digital copy. Look at what CDProject Red did with witcher 2. I bough a hard copy of the game and got the digital one free. More of that would be a nice gesture from companies but you know how that goes.

 

[wulfy42]

But, Steam has blown all of those great advantages out of the water by allowing players to spend WAY less for games. More then that, it has also spawned many other companies that offer great deals as well like green man gaming etc. You can often get brand new games....for 30-40% off if you buy digitally (GMG for instance has a 30% off sale on everything right now). If your willing to wait...you can get almost any game on Steam eventually for 75% off...and usually that is 75% off a price that has already been discounted.

Steam is able to do this because they get rid of game sharing/loaning/reselling which means that EVERY sale puts money in their pockets and developers' pockets. Steam also gives game companies a higher profit margin than storefronts do. Interestingly enough, as much as we love our preowned market, it does have a significant impact on how quickly new game costs go down.

I just hope these sales keep happening. They do get me to buy a lot that I wouldn't have gotten before but I'm still not sure what would happen if no second-hand market existed to compete.

It's kinda like getting someone addicted to drugs, give them a taste for free, or very cheap, and then once they are addicted (and especially once you corner the market so they have to come to you), you ramp up the price.

One minor advantage though is that there are many different sources of digital games coming out now. Steam is not the only kid on the block. so it's kinda like having a bunch of drug dealers all competing for the addicts sales.

As good as the deals on steam are....there are quite a few even better deals, like humble bundles, indie bundles etc...that can often blow even 75% steam sales out of the water. You can get all the RIP games, a bunch of other games that are like it etc...for $1 on one website...or all the zombie shooter games for a dollar as well etc. That is less then you pay for even one of the games on steam...even at 75% off. As long as there is competition, the prices may stay fairly low.

 

[Darkness665]

I have several collections of physical media. The one true fact about all of them is the MPAA/RIAA and the hated publishers and console manufactures will not be able to remove them from my possession. Either through dropping servers, malfeasance or stupidity these items are still mine.

When the SCOTUS decides that digital copies are mine to do with as I will then I might reconsider. But a $90 moving bill is less than two release date games or one release date game and its DLC. So your arguments are basically nonsense.

 

[PoolCleaningRobot]

I don't care for only digital unless they go no drm too otherwise I'm basically investing in a distribution service with the hope that it doesn't eventually fuck me by changing terms of service or becoming all around shitty and unpleasant to use. Switching would be a huge fucking pain if I've already bought $100s worth of stuff from some service. I'm an android guy now, but if I switch to something else? I'd lose all my Google play movies, music, whatever. Too bad there's no gog for videos cause until then, there won't be a service getting any money from me

 

[FloodOne]

Wow... So because it's more expensive to live in a smaller space in the city, that means the disc needs to die?

I bought a house with 1100 sq ft of living space and another 1100 sq ft in storage (basements are the best) for less than 90k. Three bedrooms, two full baths, and plenty of space for all of my games.

You're living in the wrong area, and paying through the nose to do it.

He's not living "in the wrong area." He's living in the only area he can, because that's the place his family got work.

My rent is so high that it's equal to my father's, brother's, and other brother's mortgages COMBINED. I live near D.C. I don't want to, but the current IT job market is such that the majority (~95%) of firms willing to hire a recent college graduate right out of college are limited to several major cities across the US. I want to live somewhere else, but if I moved there just because of it, I'd be jobless and homeless. Kinda defeats the point.

My brother in law and a good friend from high school both went to school for the same industry as you. One lives right around the corner from me, while my brother in law lives near the city he works at. My friend who owns his house, for around the same price as me, and commutes about 25 minutes to work. My brother in law pays a bit less than either of us and drives five minutes to work. Lansing is not a "major American city", it's the capitol of a state that doesn't crush its citizens with a ridiculous cost of living.

You are living in the wrong area. There are much more cost effective solutions to your problem, but you have to dig for it sometimes.

Captcha- Spend less with DISH. Fuck that, spend less on a home.

 

[IGetNoSlack]

You're living in the wrong area, and paying through the nose to do it.

He's living there due to necessity.

Not to mention Hong Kong is the 2nd most expensive place to live in the world.

At that point you use the space you have as effectively as you can.

 

[Banzaiman]

You have just defined the equivalence of computer piracy pending an alternative interpretation of #3. I say this mostly with #4 in mind. The ability to share a digital file without restrictions is just that.

Perhaps, but I thought piracy meant making a copy for free? I'd be happy to buy a game instead if it could assure me I'm not downloading a virus or getting the exact wrong game. You know, like buying straight from developers.

As for the restrictions, I was referring largely to the fact that someone had to be on your friends list for thirty days, which I think is bollocks. It's not a huge hurdle, but it just seems pointless and finicky. And I don't like that we can only give - as in, remove our copy and give it to someone else - to people in our digital family. What if there's someone else I want to give the game to?

 

[UNHchabo]

I've pretty much gone all-in for Steam, but with music I still mostly buy CDs, and then I rip them in Flac (a lossless format).

It started because I kept my CDs in a CD wallet; one time when I was moving into my college dorm, my CD wallet got stolen. All but 2-3 of my CDs were in there, so I lost nearly my entire collection. At the time I ripped my CDs as 160kbps MP3s using the program that came with my computer, which only had a 30GB hard drive. A few months later, I bought a new set of speakers, and could suddenly hear that my MP3s weren't encoded very well.

Now I buy CDs, rip them as Flacs for listening at home, and encode them [https://sourceforge.net/projects/flacsquisher/] for use in my MP3 player. I only ever buy music digitally if that's the only option, and only if it's available in Flac (or another lossless format). I'm super paranoid about my music collection getting lost a second time.

 

[Marik Bentusi]

Regarding sales: actually just recently I've treated myself to a physical BioShock Infinite from Amazon - at 50% off, just as much as Steam, and although I bought it around the evening it was delivered the very next morning - a day earlier than estimated. For someone with meh internet like myself it was about as quick as me having to download it all via Steam, plus just as cheap as during the Summer Sale, plus of course I get to put the box on my shelf where it can just look neat.
I'll say tho I'm still glad it registered on Steam which just makes a lot of stuff really convenient.

Don't really have so much money quantity becomes a problem, so can't drop a thought on that.

For me, opening the box and skimming through the manual is just part of the experience of getting excited for a new game you're about to play. Like smelling the fresh paper and ink of a new book. But I guess that's more like a personal preference.

 

[Something Amyss]

1. HDD Space: Current gen games are ever ballooning and may start exceeding 50GB marks once disks become a non-issue. This problem is currently being sidestepped by Steam by having persisting library that may be installed and uninstalled as desired. HDD storage is also rapidly increasing and is already stable in the TBs.

The install/uninstall thing is largely mitigated by internet limitations.

2. HDD reliability: If the HDD is lost or damaged, you lose everything on it. Steam is also sidestepping this by keeping a persisting library. Something like Amazon would not recover the lost file.

All my Amazon games are re-downloadable. Save files are still at issue, I guess.

3. Internet Infrastructure: Steam and PSN and MS Live can have all the best server farms in the world but there's one thing they don't have control over. The internet speed that the ISP gives its customers. Unless you live where Google Fiber is offered, chances are you're getting around 15 mbps or less. So a 20GB game is a signicant waiting period. A 40GB game (like Uncharted 3 is) can take 17 hours of continuous download time (as it did me). That does not include installation time. In that time, I could have driven to a store, purchased the game and driven back home and already be finished with the entire game before the download finished. Once this gets resolved, DVDs/Blurays/CDs will all be a thing of the past as long as legitimate online services offer a reasonable alternative.

Bandwidth caps are another issue. When you're only allowed a couple hundred GB a month, a 50+ GB game is a notable chunk and it's just one. I don't know how much people generally uninstall and reinstall games, but that could be kind of a big deal. Especially since the main reason they instate bandwidth caps is to prevent having to actually spend money on expanding infrastructure. In the future, I imagine Google fiber will spread and generate competition, but that's a while off unless you're in MO or (probably soon) one of the largest cities. In the meanwhile, I doubt they're shaking in their boots.

4. Price: Yes, Steam is practically unbeatable during its sales. However, when no sale is afoot we can often get a better deal in the preowned market. Also, a borrowed game is free, but that's not going to keep storefront's doors open.

You can find comparable prices quite often by looking around the other digital game fronts. Of course, you may give up Steam benefits from that.

. Tactile: As you stated, analogue does feel better. It helps consumers feel better about spending $60 on a file. This is something we simply need to overcome. Perhaps it's a natural trait that helps us not get suckered into bad deals like being paid double two days from now for a burger today.

Or, you know, we could price things accordingly. That would be MADNESS, I suppose.

 

[Lonewolfm16]

I'm not comfortable with everything being digital; then we're just one EMP/gamma ray burst/solar flare/spilled cup of coffee away from total loss of everything.

Trust me, its far more likely that you will mess up and lose the disk/key codes than that a massive corporation would suffer total systems loss. Most of the data would be really well backed up, and losing your clients libraries would be a PR disaster, so you can bet they are trying to keep everything safe. Meanwhile if your house burns down, there go your physical copies.

 

[Ian Kapsthan Frost]

I'm not comfortable with everything being digital; then we're just one EMP/gamma ray burst/solar flare/spilled cup of coffee away from total loss of everything.

Trust me, its far more likely that you will mess up and lose the disk/key codes than that a massive corporation would suffer total systems loss. Most of the data would be really well backed up, and losing your clients libraries would be a PR disaster, so you can bet they are trying to keep everything safe. Meanwhile if your house burns down, there go your physical copies.

Although I would generally agree that total system losses are very unlikely, I still don't see them as the biggest threat either. What if my account gets banned on cheating accusations, or because I changed my IP to get content not available in my region, or some other arbitrary reason? I really don't expect anyone to refund me for a digital library if that happened, no matter how much money I spent on it.
Also, what if the company went bankrupt? I know that Steam said that they would remove DRM on all games if something like that happened, but that is hardly a guarantee, and I'm not sure if other companies would even consider that.
And the scenario doesn't even have to be that extreme. Servers for multiplayer games get shut down all the time, and the EA-Darksopre issue could be a sign that this might happen with single player games as well (even though everything worked out in the end with Darkspore, at least for now).

Unless digital games are entirely DRM free there will essentially always be risks that I, as a user, cannot really control.

And yes, I know that my place could burn down, or get robbed (although I doubt anyone would steal a truckload of video games), but either way I would at least get insurance money, even if not that much.

There will always always always be people who want physical copies of their games. Sure digital is all well and good. Like if you have a house fire that wipes out all your games, It be nice to have a digital copy. Look at what CDProject Red did with witcher 2. I bough a hard copy of the game and got the digital one free. More of that would be a nice gesture from companies but you know how that goes.

This would be a truly great solution if more developers/publishers would go with it. Especially if the hard copy is DRM free.

 

[EvilRoy]

Also, silly article is silly, digital will become more acceptable I can concede that, but discs are never going to die. I just can't see a day coming where gaming is a completely digital thing.

Maybe that notion is born from my own hopes/fears though. Can someone remind me the name of that game the Escapist ran the story on a while back, some EA game I think it was, couple of years old, EA won't fix their crippled servers, so now the game literally cannot work?

Yeah. Imagine that but for an entire generation of gaming.

I can't speak to consoles, but on PC the transition to full digital is already well on its way. You can buy stuff on disk still sure, but chances are you're going to need a UPlay, Steam, Origin, Battlenet, ect. account to be able to use the game. If those services stop there is a chance that game will stop working as well.

Having a physical copy doesn't protect you from any of that, it just makes the download go faster since you only need to grab the patches not on the disk.

They tried to mandate this on the new xb, but it got slapped down as you probably remember. It is entirely feasible, though, that individual game developers will place requirements on their games for internet access, or an xbl account or what have you to play their game, making it effectively the same as the current climate on PC.