Games distro going digital

[Bikerdude]

A copy of my reply to a news post over on techspot, re EA going totally digital....

 

What the hell is wrong with you lot... cant any one you see the big picture. After spending £35 for a game, most of which theses days only last a few hours(portal 2), you cant sell on. Would you pay £15-20 for a blue ray movie that your stuck with.. This is just a stepping stone to EA charging what they like.

 

If publishers continue to go the digital route, they cant possibly still think of getting away with charging full retail as they currently are. Its like they want their cake and eat it, so on that line of reasoning if they want to go digital they will have lower the price of the game to something akin to rental. I don't mind begrudgingly paying £10 for a digital copy that I can keep/delete as I see fit, but £35.... - they can fcuc right off.

 

Fyi, what happened to the fact that without customers EA and other sycophant publishers would not exist, we should be telling them what we the gamers want not the other way around. And to all those stupid enough to think they way the games industry is going, I say baaaaaa, wake up and smell the coffee little sheep.

 

The only game I have on steam is the HL2 series, but after the bare faced money grab/ubder short play time with Portal2 I will never buy another Valve game. Then we have the like of UBI soft(insert your most hated game dev here..) with thew draconian DRM that only hurts legitimate customers. I was about to type "thank god we have the likes of bethesda and bioware" but I see that unless there is some huge backlash from players show games devs world wide, they too will succumb to the same bullshit.

 

on a footnote, I wonder will Sony learn from the hack attacks, as in stop trying to fcuc its customers.

[jaxa]

on a footnote, I wonder will Sony learn from the hack attacks, as in stop trying to fcuc its customers.

 

I wouldn't count on it. They've cried to Congress about Anonymous apparently (Anonymous has denied involvement, for what little it's worth). Combined with Wikileaks Cablegate and the recent increased interest in "cyberwar" among government and military types, we could be seeing some draconian legislation coming down like a hammer on Internet freedom. Well, leg. isn't necessarily required as you see with the DOJ/ICE domain seizures.

 

Back on topic, Sony is the company that put rootkits on CDs. Fcucing the customers is fine as long as there is no backlash large enough to affect the bottom line. It's nearly impossible to get most people up in arms over DRM. Compromised credit card data? Hopefully class actions and credit card co policies will bring down Sony a notch or have it broken up (successful divisions sold/spun off). I've heard two things - that Sony is likely to be liable for any unauthorized charges, and that Sony has already promised some millions for "free identity theft monitoring".

 

I don't mind begrudgingly paying £10 for a digital copy that I can keep/delete as I see fit, but £35.... - they can fcuc right off.

 

The move from a physical product to a digital copy should definitely be marked by a price decrease. How much that decrease should be is a point of contention - you hear the traditional publishers rail against the creators of games like Angry Birds that are sold at a $1 a pop, because they "cheapen" the value of games on the market. Yet there seems to be a recognition that in-depth games are inherently more valuable than casual / mobile games. EA/iD/Bioware/Ubi/etc. are still in business after all. Subscription / always networked models seem to be the proven way of the future. Look at all the people paying for stuff like WoW or Netflix. Even single player games will require a net connection to run (Mass Effect right?). It's pretty inescapable because it's the DRM that can actually separate content from the binary you bought (previous, failed DRM schemes basically give you both the "lock and key" to content and try to obfuscate the key, leading to hacks and patches sometimes within hours that create a superior product). And for multiplayer games you're looking for a social experience that can connect you to people farther than your LAN. It's convenient. All that said, Sony's PSN goes down... a single point of failure is a bad thing, downtime is possible, but it will probably be stomached by consumers. Extended downtime just means you will bring your business elsewhere by playing some other game. How many PS3 owners also have an XBOX 360 or Wii?

Edited May 7, 2011 by jaxa

[rich_is_bored]

I can't knock on Valve. They may charge nearly retail prices on Steam for newly released games but if you hold out on your purchase till it's part of a sale you can get things for practically nothing.

[lost_soul]

In short, your concirns are valid. However...

Technology is changing. The capacity of hard drives has exploded over the past decade, while optical media has made pathetic advancements in terms of capacity. I recently reinstalled the majority of my PC games. It took the better part of a day, shoving disk after disk into the CD drive to get them set up. Some installers would only copy the files at around 2X speed, even though my drive is obviously much faster than that. This annoyed the living hell out of me, as did having to insert disk two and then put disk one in again at the *END* of the installation process! Who coded this thing, a monkey? Surely they can get all information required from Disk 1 before asking for disk 2!

 

Anyway... even though I hate digital restrictions malware, I would prefer to go digital. I like services like Gog and I like my massive and cheap hard drives. They make setting things back up easier and faster. If I need to reinstall my game, I can either dig out and connect the external hard drive, or just download it again from Gog.

 

I find it funny though that people trust a company to keep authentication servers up for a game a decade later. The majority of these companies can't even bother to patch their older games to fix bugs like multi-core and graphics issues, and yet I'm supposed to believe the servers won't just disappear eventually?

[stumpy]

well its the future, this an cloud servers, where in the future you wont have a home computer, all you will have is a keyboard, monitor and a box that connects you to a cloud server where all the stuff is kept, although dont sign up to microsofts cloud server, anything you upload to their server becomes copyrighted to them.

 

Although I've used a cloud server and they're bloody slow, in a race against a sick snail, the sick snail would win.

[lost_soul]

I played some Quake 2 DM Online the other day. It was pretty fun. Sadly, most of the games coming out these days won't be playable Online in a decade.

[OrbWeaver]

I used to be negative about Steam but now I find it to deliver quite a lot of value. It may provide DRM as a side-effect, but as a user I don't notice that. What I DO notice is that I can install and run my games on any machine without having to fiddle around with CD/DVD media, purchase new games (or DLC for existing games) and have them up and running the same day rather than waiting for a physical delivery, and play online with the networking side fully integrated into Steam.

 

I'd much rather have games attached to Steam than require a CD with some shitty DRM rootkit which screws up the entire system and provides no value to the customer.

[Sotha]

I basically agree with Orb.

• Games stay updated, no need to manually find patch 1.0->1.1 then 1.1->1.2 then 1.2->1.38b then 1.38b->1.6.
• Steam games are a long update life. L4D2 is still getting improving patches and it was released a few years ago. Some games get only few patches and are then left to rot, like Farcry. Some games get new content for free too like TF2 and L4D2.
• No crappy DRM. I can just play, no need to find and swap the fricking CD.
• Community integration. If I spot enough friends online, I can just instantly collect a bunch of people to play together. No need to plan anything in advance.
• Discounts. You can get really good games for something like 5 euros if you keep your eyes open.

Of course Steam has its downsides like requiring the net connection to play and sometimes you have to wait a bit to download new patches for many games before being able to play.. But in the end I see steam pros overwhelming the cons.

[Bikerdude]

I forgot to mention about needing a net connection, I dont mind needing for the intial install, but not all the time just to play a game - That is not on, period. UBI soft tried this and there was a huge backlash. I know steam allows you to work in offline mode, but... how does it let you do that for..? Steam isnt a bad idea, but Valves attitude and the attitude of thier customer care stinks. It was that attitude that put me right of them as a company.

 

If I ever become a billionaire, one of the things I will do is smash the crap-tastic attitude that permeates the games industry.

[OrbWeaver]

As far as I am aware you can play your Steam games in offline mode indefinitely if the Internet connection is not available, although I have never tried this.

 

Regarding Portal 2, it is currently showing as "13 hours played" in my Steam account, and I have not yet finished the Co-Op campaign which I have been playing online with my brother. It is almost certain that I will want to play parts of it again, particularly to find Easter eggs or other ways of solving the puzzles, not to mention additional puzzles which are expected to be made available online. All in all I will be very surprised if I get less than 30 hours total gameplay out of it, which at 1 GBP per hour works out at very good value from my perspective.

[demagogue]

The netbook I have now doesn't even have a CD/DVD drive. So I either have to download a game or have it installed on an external HD and either play it from the EHD or slide it over onto my local HD (what I did for all my old games).

[Baddcog]

I can't knock on Valve. They may charge nearly retail prices on Steam for newly released games but if you hold out on your purchase till it's part of a sale you can get things for practically nothing.

 

Exactly. I payed $20 for orange box in a retail store 4 years ago. I still play TF2 all the time. Also got Portal and the Halflife series with it.

 

They have had sales on TF2 for $2.50 and they just released another update this week. They continually update their products. Have sales, promotions on almost all games on steam. I have a pretty large list of games I payed less than $5 for. Sure, I had to wait for a sale so didn't get them when the game was new and fresh maybe, but that's the choice. Spend more when it's all hyped, or wait and get a great deal.

 

 

 

I waited on Bioshock 2 and got it a few weeks ago for $5.

[Professor Paul1290]

I think it should be said that on a more positive note, indie developers as well as those in more specialized niches seem to have benefited from distributing games via download.

 

A lot of my recent favorite games are ones that I can't imagine doing nearly as well if it weren't for digital distribution of some kind.

 

I have a hard time picturing games like Evochron Mercenary, AI War: Fleet Command, The Void, or Amnesia: The Dark Descent working out at all without digital distribution. Sure Amnesia actually has physical copies floating around now, but I doubt they make up a significant portion of sales.

 

Of course there is a worry about being able to play old games, but it's important to remember that games aren't like books or movies. Games are like machines, and they need to be taken care of and maintained by someone or they just die slowly, and that will continue to be true unless someone comes up with some kind of magical universally accepted way of running games that will be guarenteed to continue to be supported forever. If someone somewhere wants to sell it via digital distribution or otherwise then someone has an incentive to take care of it, and having that incentive can make a big difference.

Just look at a lot of the games at Good Old Games (GOG.com). They're definitely not perfect as a lot of games still have issues, but a lot of those games would be otherwise difficult to acquire let alone run. I can't think of a practical way I would have be able to get a working copy of Outcast if it wasn't re-released on GoG.

 

I think the only game I got recently on physical DVDs was X-Plane, and that was only because a full game with all the scenery is really crazy large and would be a massive pain to download (just over 70GB).

 

The stuff that companies like EA and Ubisoft pull is really crap to be sure, but they're going to be assholes regardless of the distribution method. I don't think it would be fair to dismiss digital distribution in general just because what those companies do with it.

Edited May 7, 2011 by Professor Paul1290

[lost_soul]

I purchased a copy of SS2 some time ago and I wanted to play it on my netbook... but I can't unless I lug around a CD drive! This game cost me FOURTY BUCKS used and is over a decade old, and still I have to put up with this BS.

 

It is an example of why I buy everything either used these days, or from the bargain bin. These software publishers don't care about me and I don't care about them. Either they can provide a fun and always-usable product at a reasonable price (Gog/Frictional/id) or they don't deserve to be paid.