Comments on: The End is Nigh for Physical Retail Games

By: Vonter

Vonter — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 19:28:49 +0000

Well at least Nintendo is trying to keep on with tradition.

By: Gengyo

Gengyo — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 01:33:38 +0000

I believe that if something like this is to go into effect it needs to be treated like as if the game were, in fact, a hard copy. I play a lot of games and I’m in the lower class of Americans, and while this is true now I’m going to have plenty of money starting here in the next year or so. If I put $700 into a digital game library and then can’t play them because X company decides they are going to ban me for something ignorant… In my mind, they stole $700 from me and I’m going to be on a war-path. I do not support the idea of this kind of digital distribution method, for this one reason: They could easily put out crap games that they know no one will really like on occasion that are sold based on hype alone. They make a ridiculous amount of money and then when folks say they want their money back, “Well, sorry. You purchased a digital copy and we cant verify that you actually removed it from your computer. And even if we could do that, we wouldn’t be able to verify that you haven’t made a copy of it on some other device.” and use that as their excuse to keep all their ill-gotten gains.

By: Amy

Amy — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:44:07 +0000

I remember something about buying a Sims (Can’t remember if it was Sims 2 or 3 anymore) game from the EA store as a download purchase. In the process, it asked me if I wanted to spend money to save the game for more than 2 years. Seriously? So, okay, it saves my information in case I lose the fracking-long serial number, up to 2 years. Then, I have to pay for it if I need it. So… I smell bullsh*t.
I believe I got around it by putting the files of the game on a DVD and writing out the serial number on the case. Yeah. Lame.

By: Marco

Marco — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 23:06:57 +0000

It has to be also mentioned the cases where people can actually lose thousands of dollars worth of game library if Steam decides to (rightly or not) ban their accounts. In the past it would be like Nintendo dropping by your house to take your Pokemon Red cartridge away from you.

By: SYL

SYL — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 18:05:59 +0000

@ Sverrir Sigfússon : Indeed, that is the main reason why we don’t need to worry about “full digital” just yet.
PS : I live in Belgium and high -speed broadband internet is expensive as hell here.

By: Mumu

Mumu — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 18:05:12 +0000

I don’t think going fully digital is a good idea as someone above mentioned about Latin America, it is the same with Africa and other ‘third world’ countries. We don’t have internet in our home, most of the legal versions games we have are bought by families and friends we know in America or the UK. It seems to be very easy for these games marketing people to forget that we in the ‘third world’ exist and play video games.

By: Sverrir Sigfússon

Sverrir Sigfússon — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 17:44:50 +0000

The all digital future isn’t viable until high-speed broadband internet is universally available.

By: hallam

hallam — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 17:26:11 +0000

By the way, I had no sources for my comment other than having lived there a long while and struggling with any kind of streaming media. So take it with a grain of salt.

By: hallam

hallam — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 17:23:54 +0000

I’ve read about this in several places and they never mention that a decent amount of game sales come from less-developed countries, where only like 5% of costumers have the kind of broadband we’d call “acceptable”.

Sure, the industry spins around the big markets like the US and Japan where downloading a full game isn’t a big deal. But I’ve lived in a lot of places where the standard broadband is just 1 Mb/s, and many gamers don’t even have an internet connection at home. I’m not even talking about some god-forsaken village in El Salvador, I mean most of Latin America, with huge cities where you can find a bazillion GameStop-like stores. Even Blockbuster is still holding on over there, since Netflix has only just arrived and isn’t yet known whether it will succeed in a market with poor broadband service.

Going fully digital, right now, would kill these foreign markets, because gamers’ internet access isn’t reliable enough to force them to log in everytime time; and downloading a full game (especially next-gen) would take anywhere between 20 and 80 hours. And these markets, altough not the biggest, surely mean a lot to manufacturers and publishers.

If full digitalization goes on in the US and some other places, it would still be easy to get physical copies of games, imported from other regions where digitalization is still decades away.

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 17:15:49 +0000

You can download the full game of mass effect 3 on the Playstation store. If you are a plus member you can play the first 60 minutes free before purchasing it.