The Future is Still Retail

[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.

 

[keitarobg]

Hm, well I've got converted... I was one of those people, that thought DIGITAL will prevail, but you make fair arguments and I can't really argue with any of those - you're right. Retail is here to stay for a long, long time!

 

[Negatempest]

For me, I have this "Paranoia" about having all my information in my computer. Less to do with hacking and more to do with my comp going on the fritz for one reason or another. That is why I keep any and all passwords and usernames in a black book of mine.

If one of your games becomes unplayable for one reason or another that single game is effected, not everything. If you use a computer and it goes on the fritz, than you can't play your hard copy games until your computer is fixed. If you have all your games digitally downloaded AND the computer is on the fritz, than your SOL unless you saved your KEY numbers. Now all you have to do is install every single game you digitally downloaded into your computer. Yeah, that isn't going to take forever.

One more thing, for those that say that computer connections will get better, I LOL in their FACE!!!! It was reported in my hometown that we would get cable internet to do better than DLC, that was 6+ YEARS AGO and we still do not have cable at all. Sure bigger cities would have better connection, but not everyone lives in a big city there are still ALOT of small cities and towns all over everywhere in the world.

EDIT: I have a hard copy of FONV. I decided to re-install the game because I messed up on some mods. So I decided "Hey why not use steam to re-install it since it gives me that option", so I had steam re-install the game and gave me the waiting time of 18 hours. Than I decided to cancel that out and re-install from the Disc. The disc took 20+ minutes to install the program. During those 18+ hours I could have gone to a store, bought 2+ games, talk with friends, eat dinner, than return home and install both games. Chances are, all that would have been faster than waiting for one game to install.

 

[Jacob.pederson]

Here's how you take your digital copies to your friends house.

step 0: go to friends house
step 1: type in steam account
step 2: type in steam password

I dunno about you guys and gals but my friends and I do this all the time at LANS (who doesn't have an extra computer around for guests nowadays?). Ditto for Starcraft 2.

Also, it really isn't that difficult to pack up your 360 and take it to a friends house either (a little more complicated than typing a password in, but not much). I have a station set up in my living room that has all the cabling run, my friend just needs to pop in a 360 and go. Xbox live is absolutely genius at tunneling multiple 360's through upnp NAT's btw.

 

[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.

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.

His speed is 4x faster then mine. I'm on a 1mb connection, and I know others who are on a slower speed. Rural Vermont doesn't have much in the way of fast internet. There's satellite, but that is just awful for playing games online.

Although there is a silver lining to my situation, for my current ISP, there's no contract, or bandwidth cap. So I guess in retrospect its not all bad. But still slow as hell...

 

[Souplex]

You're forgetting three groups:
The come lates: If a game isn't profitable to sell via digital distribution, it will be taken off the market, this goes for old games as well as it costs money to maintain servers and server space is limited. Say I wanted to go back and play a classic that I didn't get a chance to play when it originally came out. I am going to have a harder time finding it through digital distribution as the data simply won't be there anymore.
Those who seek stability: Hard copies are reliable, they're there, there won't be some sort of download problem.
Those who understand economics: Digital distribution is cheaper because it's built around less people being involved. It kills jobs. Digital distribution is inherently built to monopolize. If Steam were the only source for games, then they could charge you whatever they wanted. And I don't like the idea of giving money to Valve so they can put more money into damaging the games industry through their bad ideas.

 

[sunpop]

If digital distribution drops game prices like it should then yeah it would gain a bigger hold over the market. But at the moment my choice was to buy cataclysm in store for 40$ or buy it online for 40$ and I said well for the same price I want my damn physical copy. So in a few days I will have a box and on wed it wont matter what I did lol.

 

[lawdjayee]

Always the same basic assumptions, that "improvements" in tech make change inevitable, that everyone has the same idea of what constitutes an improvement etc. The first point to make is that the reason surveys ask for "connected" rather than "actually use" is because the "actually use" numbers are comparatively low and subject to manipulation. I've never seen any article blaring about huge rates of change in console internet use, have you?

What's been happening in entertainment for quite some time isn't a gradual convergence to a single standard, but instead the creation of increasingly diversified niche markets. Console gamers who are heavy internet users (i.e. everyone on this board) are a niche market...but it is probably nice to think of yourself as a daring pioneer early adopter paving the way for the awesome future.

 

[jono793]

Nice article.

A market dominated by digital distribution is nothing but a pipe-dream. Publishers and developers want it for obvious enough reasons; more money in their collective pockets. But Unless there is a *serious* revolution in consumer habits, I predict that DD sales will level out at a sizeable minority of the market.

As Seamus says, shopping habits aren?t logical. Nevertheless, there are trends. Trends that DD Cheerleaders seem completely oblivious to. For example, people do not (as has been suggested) generally drive to town, buy a single game, and drive back without doing anything else. People go out to town for the day. They go to the supermarket, during which time they might browse the games section. Perhaps they?re looking for a gift and want to talk to a real person. It is almost impossible for an industry to change those sorts of habits in the short term.

But DD has increased in value to the industry. Well yes, but the figures don?t tell the whole story. Even if DD now accounts for X% of industry sales, we never hear what that actually consists of. Are we talking about games at full retail price? Are they marked-down special offers? What about DLC (free or paid), linked to a physical purchase? This is important, because the industry?s business model relies on the sale of full games at full price. If DD can?t deliver that as reliably as a non-digital retailer, the industry faces a painful and costly reformation.

Then we have to ask who?s using DD. The figures aren?t readily available, but we can make inferences. We know for example, that men tend to buy things from websites like Play.com and Amazon, while women tend to buy more from shops. I suspect the majority of DD users are tech-savvy 20 to 30-something males. Fine when you?re selling Dragon Age or Mass Effect. Not so great when it comes to your Kinect titles, your Wii Sports, your casual games. Most, if not all the new money in the last five years has come from the industry targeting people outside the traditional gaming demographic. DD simply will not reach that audience at present!

So Digital Distribution is not the saviour of the industry, and will probably never overtake sales of the physical product.

 

[Space Jawa]

Consumers won't abandon retail because it's the most rational choice. PRODUCERS will abandon retail because it's the most ECONOMICAL choice.

It won't matter what Producers want if Consumers aren't interested in following them. As long as there are enough consumers who want to continue to purchase through retail, then producers will continue to make their products available through retail, simply because it'll be more economical not to cut themselves off from those customers.

Here's how you take your digital copies to your friends house.

step 0: go to friends house
step 1: type in steam account
step 2: type in steam password

I dunno about you guys and gals but my friends and I do this all the time at LANS (who doesn't have an extra computer around for guests nowadays?). Ditto for Starcraft 2.

And for those who don't use steam/the download purchase system of their friends choice?

Oh, and I'm sure there are large numbers of people who don't keep an extra computer around for guests. I know I sure don't. Why would I spend that kind of money on a computer that's just sitting around in case a friend needs to use it?

Also, it really isn't that difficult to pack up your 360 and take it to a friends house either (a little more complicated than typing a password in, but not much). I have a station set up in my living room that has all the cabling run, my friend just needs to pop in a 360 and go. Xbox live is absolutely genius at tunneling multiple 360's through upnp NAT's btw.

Or, with a physical copy, if both you and your friend own an Xbox, you can just take your copy of the game and a memory storage unit (memory stick or memory card or what have you) over to their place and plug them into your friends system. Much easier, if you ask me.

 

[Kenjitsuka]

Completely right as always, Shamus.
Also: "I hope you like typing serial numbers!" hehehe

 

[Fatal-X]

I sometimes buy games digitaly but only if I don't have a choice(for example the game is a PSN exclusive). I dislike programs like Steam, spyware shit if you ask me. And their prices aren't that good either, it's only worth it when there's a promotion or something. I'd personally always stick to retail games.

 

[VladG]

The points are very fair. Despite the fact that I'm not much of a collector, don't care for achievements and such, and consider myself a very practical person, I still bought a retail copy of Cataclysm instead of the digital download at the exact same price, despite the fact that my retail copy will arrive during mid day on the 7th and not instantly as soon as the clock beats midnight. It just feels more comfortable to have an actual item to hold and justify the spent money.

 

[MetroidNut]

This has been mentioned many times before, but I think it's worth reiterating.

I downloaded the Orange Box off of Steam. Wonderful games, all five of them, and practically a steal at their price. But it took me about three days of near-constant downloading to get all the games installed, and my connection wasn't even that bad. If I had been able to find the Orange Box for PC in a store, I could probably have installed all five games in a couple hours. I wouldn't have been effectively unable to use my computer for three days.

In short, I say there will always be a market for retail games, and although my case was hardly extreme and did not prevent me from buying the digital version, I'd be willing to bet quite a few people would refuse to put up with massive download times and simply avoid buying large games if digital was the only choice.

 

[poiuppx]

Retail will never die because of punks like me, who love-love-LOVE physical media ownership. Who relish having collections massive enough to build a guest home out of the plastic involved. Who delight in being able to have something crazy happen, like for example a girlfriend having an 80s-themed birthday party and being able to lug over my NES and a massive bundle of cartridges for it, or a buddy who still sticks by his PS2 and being able to loan him a crapton of games when finances are tight.

Now, this doesn't mean I don't also enjoy digital distribution. A couple bucks and some time downloading equaling a tasty game for me to enjoy, hell, I can dig that. But I can get the same thrill times ten when I drop by my local stores and drop dimes for some low-cost games (and CDs and DVDs). And then I own them. And I can do as I wish with them. Loan them, watch them solo, watch them with others, have them sit on my shelf and look pretty. It's hard to add to a room with CD-Rs alone.