The Future is Still Retail

[CrystalShadow]

This isn't even accounting for internet speeds of connected consoles, as you touched on, in the quote below. Connected could be anything.

Some of those folks simply cannot reach broadband access from where their console is sitting.

When I first got on Xbox Live, the first thing I did was download Shivering Isles. That's the sole reason I got online in the first place, really.

Do you know how long it took to download with my internet at the time?

18 fucking hours.

Hehe, I remember when I bought Mass Effect off of Steam.

Took me 2 months of on/off downloading for it to finally finish. If I let it download and not stop it(and if my internet stayed on throughout) then it would have taken 2 straight weeks of downloading.

Thats another thing with Digital Distribution. I'm curious to see how many people are willing to sit and wait for 10+ gigabytes of data to download. I don't care how fast your internet is, downloading that much data takes a long-ass time. It'd be faster to just go to the store and buy it.

Eh. Connection speeds are one of those things...

I used to download large files on a 56k modem.
Now, those same files that took upwards of 20-30 hours to download, take all of 2 minutes.

Waiting 18 hours for something to download is painful.

Waiting 30 minutes? Not so much.

 

[Irridium]

This isn't even accounting for internet speeds of connected consoles, as you touched on, in the quote below. Connected could be anything.

Some of those folks simply cannot reach broadband access from where their console is sitting.

When I first got on Xbox Live, the first thing I did was download Shivering Isles. That's the sole reason I got online in the first place, really.

Do you know how long it took to download with my internet at the time?

18 fucking hours.

Hehe, I remember when I bought Mass Effect off of Steam.

Took me 2 months of on/off downloading for it to finally finish. If I let it download and not stop it(and if my internet stayed on throughout) then it would have taken 2 straight weeks of downloading.

Thats another thing with Digital Distribution. I'm curious to see how many people are willing to sit and wait for 10+ gigabytes of data to download. I don't care how fast your internet is, downloading that much data takes a long-ass time. It'd be faster to just go to the store and buy it.

Eh. Connection speeds are one of those things...

I used to download large files on a 56k modem.
Now, those same files that took upwards of 20-30 hours to download, take all of 2 minutes.

Waiting 18 hours for something to download is painful.

Waiting 30 minutes? Not so much.

Well, I wish my connection was as fast as yours.

 

[CrystalShadow]

This isn't even accounting for internet speeds of connected consoles, as you touched on, in the quote below. Connected could be anything.

Some of those folks simply cannot reach broadband access from where their console is sitting.

When I first got on Xbox Live, the first thing I did was download Shivering Isles. That's the sole reason I got online in the first place, really.

Do you know how long it took to download with my internet at the time?

18 fucking hours.

Hehe, I remember when I bought Mass Effect off of Steam.

Took me 2 months of on/off downloading for it to finally finish. If I let it download and not stop it(and if my internet stayed on throughout) then it would have taken 2 straight weeks of downloading.

Thats another thing with Digital Distribution. I'm curious to see how many people are willing to sit and wait for 10+ gigabytes of data to download. I don't care how fast your internet is, downloading that much data takes a long-ass time. It'd be faster to just go to the store and buy it.

Eh. Connection speeds are one of those things...

I used to download large files on a 56k modem.
Now, those same files that took upwards of 20-30 hours to download, take all of 2 minutes.

Waiting 18 hours for something to download is painful.

Waiting 30 minutes? Not so much.

Well, I wish my connection was as fast as yours.

Connection speeds are something of a lottery, to be honest.

Mine is the cheapest option my provider has, but it's 10 megabits/second. (they do up to 50, or even 100 in a lot of places.)

And yet, 10 megabits that actually reliably gives that speed is above average in a country where DSL is still the norm...

And if you're unlucky enough to be in a country like Australia...

Well, let's just say I was chatting on a webcam to someone in Brisbane about their expensive 'fast' 4 megabit connection.

It felt a little weird to then have to say that my connection (which for me was mainly just the 'cheapest' available option), was more than twice that speed.

 

[sagacious]

The Future is Still Retail

He isn't saying the future is retail

Actually, I think that is pretty much what he is saying.

The headline of an Article is determined by the Escapist's Editor, not the Author of the article. Oftentimes, the Editor comes away with a different opinion of what the article was saying than someone else might. Shamus didn't say the future is still retail, the editor did.

Therefore my point still stands.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

I'm saying that the business logic of the company, keeping track of records, receipts, and other information no longer relies so heavily on it. I even use a clipboard for taking notes at meetings sometimes... unless it is an online meeting, then I of course use Notepad++.

Find out where your archives are. Find out how much spam mail you get. Find out how many faxes still are around. That was all meant to be done away with.

I actually am not familiar with the prediction you are citing,

Google is your friend.

but I can't imagine it being one that is foreshadowing the lack of use of wood pulp in construction, though if somehow that is what it is going for I would be wrong.

Total replacement of paper by electronic, ceramic/plastic (I believe?) means. Including all back ups.

If you don't know how to write, that's another problem entirely. Atrophy.

Yes, though my handwriting has never been particularly beauteous. I've also lost the ability to hunt with a spear, start fire with flint and tinder, or chisel stone into roughly round objects. Not sure how I'm going to live in this crazy new future world without such basic skills ;-)

Reductio Ad Absurdum.
I believe starting fires is still taught in afterschool activities. Writing is certainly taught to quite a higher point in schools. Signatures are still how you get hold of a lot of your future goods.

 

[Timmibal]

Hey games industry: How do I take my digital copy of Twisted Metal Gears of Warfare over to my friend's house?

I've purchased games because I experienced them through friends. It would be foolish to dismiss the power and importance of this viral individual-delivery demo.

You are a filthy pirate and owe greedcorp games fifty squillion dollars and your left testicle for such damaging behaviour. Shame on you, you cost us 75000 sales. You should have purchased an additional copy for every person in the room, it says so quite clearly on the EULA.

It's always funny to see writers bag out on filesharers one week and then turn around and laud it as a legitimate means of advertising the next.

 

[Space Jawa]

Yes, actually, it will. You're wrong. How do I know this? Because people like me aren't going to let any industry, let alone the video game industry, enforce "false scarcity" when digital distribution is already on it's way to eliminating the need to pay for anything information-related.

No, actually, it won't. You're wrong. How do I know this? Because people like me aren't interested in going digital to buy all our software and like owning physical copies of the games or books or movies that we buy.

 

[likalaruku]

STILL? By god & willikers! What kind of slow progressing world do we live in where retail is still king? This shall not stand!

 

[Tom Carlyon]

i don't think anything goes away completely, and some of the digital retailers, the ones that still give you the box i mean, like amazon and such, incorporated impulse buying onto their system. like a deal for getting two other items or similar items from what your getting. but as long as capitalism lives, nothing that makes money ever truly dies

 

[Phishfood]

I 100% agree. I like having things I can hold and move and especially things I can say to my insurance company "this was also destroyed in the fire" or whatever. Steam is good in allowing unlimited downloads, but if someone stole my PC with my steam logon details saved on it...hrm...gonna untick that box now I think...

back to topic..
90% of my DVD purchases at least are more "impulse" from walking through a shop, seeing said DVD and thinking "I liked that" or "I never saw that, looks good". Browsing play.com or amazon just isn't the same and thats still talking about buying a physical product.

Consider this too. Digital downloads are potentially unsustainable. Take steam again. Steam offers every game I ever bought from them for redownload at will. If I never buy another game from them again I am doing nothing but costing them money every time I download an old game, never mind patches to things like TF2.

 

[ZephrC]

That's a pretty good article, but it forgets one very important thing. We're going to grow old and die.

Seriously. I'd be pretty depressed to not have anything under my Christmas tree, but I'm willing to bet that a lot of kids today would be at least as excited to find stuff in Steam and email links and crap like that. Plus having a neat collection on a shelf isn't really any more satisfying than having a neat collection on you Steam list, it's just what us old curmudgeons are used to doing.

That basically works for everything on the list. So yeah, as long as there are dinosaurs like us around retail will always be relevant, although perhaps not dominant, and maybe even most of the kids on this site are old enough that they'll never want to give up their plastic disks and useless instruction manuals, but kids that're too young for this site right now? They'll never care about any of that crap. Mark my words.

So yeah, maybe it'll take a bit longer than the experts think for retail software sales to die, but it will happen.

 

[Zechnophobe]

Find out where your archives are. Find out how much spam mail you get. Find out how many faxes still are around. That was all meant to be done away with.

I know exactly where my archives are, they are on a server in a farm near las vegas, and backed up to another on a different power grid about 20 miles from there.

Reductio Ad Absurdum.
I believe starting fires is still taught in afterschool activities. Writing is certainly taught to quite a higher point in schools. Signatures are still how you get hold of a lot of your future goods.

A lot, though a signature is a unique marque, not necessarily words. I'm not really sure what this has to do with anything though. You can argue all you want about how much paper may still exist in a company, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to what would have been required 60 years ago. The database I work on, and maintain, holds Terabytes of data. All of it actual information, about clients, procedures, etc. If you were to write it all down and put it on paper, it'd fill rooms! And I can get aggregate information across this data with a few well written queries. Sure, I sign the little slip when I buy a stapler, but comparing the two... is truly ridiculous.

I mean, even postal carriers are using digital signatures now, so the person who sent the package can be immediately updated on its status.

 

[Zechnophobe]

I 100% agree. I like having things I can hold and move and especially things I can say to my insurance company "this was also destroyed in the fire" or whatever. Steam is good in allowing unlimited downloads, but if someone stole my PC with my steam logon details saved on it...hrm...gonna untick that box now I think...

Steam does have a password retrieval process, though I had some trouble with it last time I tried it . Did work out in the end.

back to topic..
90% of my DVD purchases at least are more "impulse" from walking through a shop, seeing said DVD and thinking "I liked that" or "I never saw that, looks good". Browsing play.com or amazon just isn't the same and thats still talking about buying a physical product.

Not a particularly compelling argument. I understand that it is a familiar process for you, but what about your children? What about their children? Familiarity is bound to a person, when we first grow into such patterns, they are based on availability.

Consider this too. Digital downloads are potentially unsustainable. Take steam again. Steam offers every game I ever bought from them for redownload at will. If I never buy another game from them again I am doing nothing but costing them money every time I download an old game, never mind patches to things like TF2.

This would be true if it were setup like a pyramid scheme, but you don't really use that much network from steam. How often will you download old games? I mean, you'd have to do it pretty much constantly to warrant any noticeable drain on their connection. And really, how likely is a scenario where you use the service but aren't covering the cost of your downloads?

Patches for existing games are just the same. You think Valve is throwing money out the window even NOW with their TF2 lineup of patches? All that is, is a clever marketing campaign to get people on steam, playing and buying games. Marketing always pays off in the long run.

If despite all this, it still ends up being true that people are using the Digital Distributer, but not paying for more content, it would be a sign of some deeper economic problem, that I don't think a retail store would recover from any better.

 

[Sedweiler]

Here's one more follower to the Team Nostalgia.

Whether it's games, movies, music or books, I want my stuff as a physical object, that I can put on my shelf, that I can admire even without my computer on. I am so nostalgia-driven, that I sometimes even miss the old cardboard boxes PC-games used to come in, even though they are not practical. I miss the times, when game manuals used to have more indepth information about the game, instead of putting all that stuff into the website (some still do that, though, and I do actually browse through game websites reading all about the lore of the game's world).

Nostalgia is the reason why I am often tempted to buy an old 8-bit NES from somewhere.

Am I rational? Nope.

If I were a rational person, I would spend less time here, and spend more time actually studying. And yet....

 

[Quizza]

I couldn't disagree more, Shamus. Consumers won't abandon retail because it's the most rational choice. PRODUCERS will abandon retail because it's the most ECONOMICAL choice.

1. Collectors: I don't see your point. I personally collect tabletop rpgs in digital format, and I don't see why digital games would make any difference. I'm not saying that physical copies of the game will disappear, though. But I believe that any phyisical copy will be called "collector's edition", and you will be able to get have it if you want. But you will order it online and receive it by mail. You know, like Amazon and Ebay are doing for years.

2. Visitors: Just upload your digital copy on a support, like for example a USB key. I believe that a lot of "portable game archives" will pop up when digital copies become more common.

3. Gift Givers: See point one. Also, in my gaming group we purchase digital rpg copies for each other. They are cheaper, which means more gifts for each of us.

4. Impulse Buyers: See above. Also, you are more likely to buy something by impulse if it costs less (and digital copies cut lots of the cost, so they will usually be cheaper)

5. Unconnetted: Unconnetted people are disappearing. Most consoles and games already require you to have some sort of connection. People without an internet access will still exist, but I doubt they will be considered a market by game developers.

In short, developers will do what's better for them. They will do like pirates do today (except it will be a legal market) because it's cheaper. Consumism, as much as the name seems to say otherwise, is not driven by the consumer's need and preference, but by the producer's ones.

 

[JemJar]

There is one significant point which I feel always gets left behind in the digital distribution debate:

Have any of you people moved house lately?

Now clearly your mileage may vary, but I know plenty of people who've moved house (and/or like me, changed country) and found themselves without internet access for a month or two. You want to talk about digital distro and DRM which dials in, you've got to talk about that percentage of people at any one time who have no internet access.

Just last weekend, I went over to help out a new friend who's moved in down the road from me. She had bought Fallout New Vegas for the PC (on a disk, from Amazon) and without internet couldn't even install it. We hooked up her PC to my mobile phone to get it installed and then download hundreds of megabytes of patch.

Until then she was totally cut off from new releases, and even half her existing games collection (Steam apparently being erratic about what you can and can't play offline) and she still will be for another couple of weeks.

Shamus's fourth point is an interesting one, but I'd love to see, at any one moment in time, what that disconnected percentage is for PC users.

Experienced Points: The Future is Still Retail

The era of digital distribution may be upon us, but retail won't ever go away.

We're still waiting for the paperless office (predicted in 1975). Funny how offices seem to have even more paper now....

I work in an office. I almost don't need to know how to WRITE because I use physical paper so rarely. Imagine all those e-mails you send each day, the online training manuals for your product, or the complex process of getting authenticated by an outside company for doing good business.

We may not have paperless offices now, but compared to the 1950s... we might as well.

That last line? I smell bovine faeces. Paper now is cheap. It's insane.

Back in the 50s everyone shared documentation around (what documentation there was) because it was hassle to get things printed out or copied out by typists. Now, if I want a 50 page document at work, there's no way I'll be asking around my team if anyone's got a copy in a drawer. I'll hit print and in seconds I'll have my own copy to scribble on and take to that big meeting this afternoon.

I'll agree with you that the pen is dying, but paper? Not until we've all got a few iPads each.

 

[Caliostro]

But it will never kill retail entirely, because retail serves people that digital can't reach for technological, psychological, and cultural reasons.

Here's the thing you're forgetting: These things change.

20 years ago, people said these same things for cellphones, 6 years ago they said Steam would flop... And here we are. Everyone has a cellphone,when not 2 or 3, and Steam has taken over PC sales.

I'm not, by any means, saying it'll happen tomorrow. Hell, maybe not even in our lifetime, although I don't think it'll be long till digital becomes the norm.

Everything you said is true though, but, IMO, and considering human behaviour is my "area", I think you've left out a few things:

1. The Collectors

Absolutely true. Collectors are a big "safety net", and most often the ones that'll happily fork over the extra 10 or 20 bucks for the "special edition" with some sort of plastic trinket. The thing you're forgetting though is that collectors collect (period). "Going digital" isn't an impediment, it's a change. Instead of having your typical "shrine", you'll have a digital one. This won't stop people. Hell, what are achievements and gamerscores if not digital collectibles?

2. The Visitors

True, but, again, this won't stop. It's less practical, but I can load up my steam at a friend's place and let him play. Meanwhile, platforms like Steam have actually taken to transposing this kind of interaction into a digital plane: "Recommended for you", "Recommended by a friend", "Recommend a friend", "Your friends own this game", "You have X friends now playing this game", "Your friends have been playing:", etc... People can still play games at your house, and you can still play games at a friend's house. In fact, you don't even run the risk of losing the CD.

3. The Gift-givers

True, to us the perspective of a child running at a Christmas tree only to find plastic cards sounds silly. To our grandparents or great grandparents, the idea of Christmas being about gifts sounds outrageous. Hell, half of the gifts we now consider "AWESOME!!!" look ridiculous to them. Things change.

You're also right that your typical grandmother is hard pressed to buy stuff digitally. Your grandmother or mine, yes, I totally agree. But I doubt your grandmother is still buying you videogames for christmas. Mine sure isn't.

Don't forget Shamus, your average grandparent today is very computer illiterate. As the average grandparent 50 years ago was plain old illiterate. Again, things change. The gift-giving grandparents of tomorrow are the downloading, uploading, review viewing, hardware assembling kids of today. 50 or 60 years from now, you're gonna be the one buying your even-more-computer-literate grandchildren presents. And you'll probably still buy them some outdated game they'll fake their best smile at while saying "thanks grandpa!", because they know you meant well. And you'll do it on Steam. Or Impulse. Or whatever the fuck will be the "norm" then.

3. The Impulse buyers

You have 2 points #3... but I'm being pedantic.

Really Shamus? You think impulse buying isn't applicable to digital platforms? Go to our PC gaming group, or the TF2 one, or any group that revolves around PC gaming, ask them how much money did they spend on this last "Steam Pre-holiday special" that they never intended to spend. Ask them how many times did they buy stuff they weren't particularly looking for at that specific time, because steam, or impulse, or any other platform suddenly did a "special".

4. The Unconnected

Shamus, the internet has been around for public use for just 20 years. In 1996, less than 3% of Norway had internet. In 2002, 72% was covered. Just one generation ago, during the PS2 and Xbox era, going digital seemed like a lost cause. The Xbox "championed" that notion the most, but regardless, most games did not come with an online multiplayer mode, and if they did it'd be as a quirky extra. Now you're hard pressed to find a game with split screen or with a multiplayer mode that isn't online. In just one generation we went from having barely any connected players to connected players being the norm.

Took us about 5 years to get around 70% of console users connected. How long do you think it'll be to get those final 30%? And do you honestly think developers will give a shit once we get to, like, 90%?

I don't think we'll see retail die down just yet, hell, not even in 20 years, but it will happen. If nothing else, because retail of any kind will simply become obsolete, like carrier pigeons and galleys.

 

[andrew.wright16]

For people who dont have fast speeds for their internets- remember we're talking about future events, broadband speeds have been getting faster and faster with improved technologies, and with that it gets cheaper too. Eventually no one should have a problem paying for high speed internet.

HOWEVER, I do contradict myself slightly when I criticize physical copies of games. For music and stuff, I love to have a CD collection; everyone who agrees with me probably couldn't explain why- there is just something about having a physical CD or vinyl that is much more precious.

To put it in another way, a cabinet full of records that I've treasured for 20 years is much better for me than a silver box propped on a table containing 10TB of my favourite music (hyperbole I know).

 

[Nukeforyou]

i bought a disc the other day (because it was cheaper than digital) and i found out its been so long since I've used my CD drive that it died of dust now its either unscrew it and clean it out or buy a new 1 for 20$ .. if i would have just bought the game digital i'd be 100% fine

 

[TraderJimmy]

Hard copy games = Hardcover books.

Worst case scenario.

And people still buy Hardcovers, last I checked.