Sony Boss Downplays Digital Future

[McClaud]

When movies slowly transfer over to a purely digital format - regardless of whether a portion of Americans/Europeans can affort to buy the appropriate machines to watch pure digital movies - then console/computer games are not far behind. The saved cost of digitalization will win out against the costly physical copy.

Regardless of what you say about saved cost for production, there are still people who want to buy physical copies. There is still demand. You're assuming that, if game distribution switched to a strictly digital format, all of the people who buy physical copies will switch along with it. This is not necessarily the case. I, for one, would stop buying games altogether. I'd play them at friends' houses, if at all. Ceasing production of physical copies may cut cost, but it would also cut profit.

There's a couple of factors that vector in, though (since I work in this market, I've been to these meetings):

It's largely dependent on the group that corporations concentrate on. Most gaming companies are not targeting the guys who have barely enough money to buy one of their big titles, but people who have a disposable income. I know that - despite Hirai's latest rant - Sony is focused on the players who are online buying online games, DLC and/or movies. The Blu ray is hardly talked about in these meetings.

The other issue is that even while there's a market to be had, corporations don't always cater to them or care about them. Demand of physical copies is considered a small customer group. I'm not happy about it, myself, but they are driven by C-level decisions. And C-level decisions aren't always intelligent or even logical decisions. Right now, there's a corporate focus on how to get things from a physical, pricey format to an easily-hosted, digital download format. They also don't care about sustainability of multiplayer games. Companies like Activision/Blizzard and EA (big distributors) and their buddies THQ, Square and Valve don't want to produce physical copies anymore. They are only focused on eliminating the middle man right now.

I'm with you - I like physical copies. But I'm also not going to lie to myself when I'm sitting in the midst of corporations looking to go entirely digital. Especially in the movie/music business. It's all upper management/stockholder pressure right now, so the people in the lower echelons are being ignored in our attempt to keep the entire market in view.

 

[Draksila]

I'm not saying that digital downloads are some kind of saviours of the industry.
It has its flaws, definitely.
Most of your arguments seem to be about shitty distributors rather than actual flaws of the concept.
Steam is a good example of how to do it right.

Also, God probably doesn't even exist, so don't blame 'him' when shit happens.

But, see, therein lies the rub. If you can't trust the distributors, then you can't trust the digital downloads. And while I agree that Steam has made great strides in download support, they're one distributor. Aaaaand... those games I mentioned that are no longer supported through the original downloads? Three of them were from Steam in it's infancy (the three expansions to the original Half-life, to be specific). So even the best in the field can't gaurantee what having a physical copy vaulted away somewhere can.

I secede your point that there are crappy DRMs out there that limit the amount of times you can install from a single purchased disc, and yes it's just as bad as limited downloads. But I don't buy those games either. And I've found that it's much more common to have a game bound to a single account (ala Blizzard, Steam, or even PSN) in such a way that it doesn't stop me having a copy on multiple computers over the years, so long as I'm not logged into all of them at once. I'm more than comfortable with that anti-piracy measure.

And please don't drag religion into this. I used to work in the insurance business; 'Act of God' is a catch-all for unforeseeable accidents, not a religious reference. Even if the terminology is a throwback to such things.