Photomotoz
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In this digital age it is becoming more and more common to see media like music, movies, books and games move away from being sold in physical forms and more in digital formats.
I want to know what you guys think about all this. Judging from the thread title it should be fairly obvious that I am against the idea of it.
There are many reasons a person could have for wanting physical copies and many of them are in reality arguments that are not really reasonable. Arguments such that sounds something along the lines of "I just want to have it", it just seems to enforce the idea that people who want to have physical copies of media are either; obsessive about having possessions or material goods or the people have some sort of technology related fear.
More reasonable arguments are ones such as the idea that a person may think that if the media in question is only obtainable in one location(XBLA games, Wii console, Steam) and are not copyable that once the service in question is offline they are left without said media. This argument is fair, but it seems like something that is not an imminent issue, it is something that only affects people over the longterm and it has not been really seen yet what truly happens in such a situation.
The best argument I see is that of resale. In most, if not all cases of digital media; you cannot resell the thing you paid for or even return it. Say you buy an Xbox 360, and you buy a bunch of games from XBLA. If you do not like some of them after a while there is nothing you can do, you can not make any of the money back, and in the case of the Microsoft Points it complicates things even more since you are buying the points not the game. Let's say you sell the console, your account with all those games is worthless and will add nothing to the consoles resell price. You can spend $100 on retail games on launch day and a month later maybe get back $60 of it. But spend any amount on most digital media and you could not get a penny back.
Now, games that are on XBLA and even the games on the VC are really not the issues here. Those games are cheap(Adds up though) and most of the time you know if you will like something or not. What concerns me are games like Warhawk and games on Steam. Buying games that retail $50 or so dollars seems like a dangerous idea in the sense that if you dislike the game or it does not work(Steam) you could be facing hundreds of dollars in loss over some period of time.
Example : You buy HL2 from Steam. Your computer specs are too low. What now?
Sell it? Nope. You can "Gift it", but good luck finding a buyer. You can sell your account, assuming you have only the one game.
Return it? Impossible.
So you are stuck with it.
Another scenario, the service where you bought your game goes down. In the case of Steam you are screwed, they 'might' release patches that make the game not rely on Steam but would they have that for the game install too? For XBox games you are fine until the console dies and you try to get your content back. The situation is not as bad for consoles as it is for PCs, yet.
Consoles are going more and more toward a PC standard with things like installs and patches becoming more and more common. Just imagine the consoles as a PC that has a standardized hardware configuration and OS. The PS3 looks like that already, with installs being common and features like a browser and keyboard/mouse support.
The previous scenarios are console specific and do not really apply to things like music, movies and books. The main reason this is true is because there are methods to copying that media easily. More and more is being to make this false but there will always be something to counteract that, or so I hope.
With a console game you cannot copy a game, digital or not, and have it work on an unmodified console.
Digital distribution also kills the second-hand market, this goes hand in hand with reselling. If there is a fully digital market you would never be able to buy something 'below-retail' you would be at the whim of the distributor. You can bet that there would be a scant few. With a product that has not physical footprint it is all to easy to restrict it's sale within certain criteria. My point for this argument : forget this site, CAG is obsolete.
Scenario : A developer makes a game and sends it off to a distributer. They have the option to release in retail. They don't. Digital saves money on packaging, printing discs. All they do is upload some code and modify a site. Really, no cost for them. They price the game at $50. And that is it. They leave it at that price for a year, until the sequel hits. They then lower the price to $40 to drive sales. They have a lot less reason to lower prices, they have no 'inventory' to move. There is no wasted space in some warehouse. The only reason to lower the price is to temporarily drive sales. This is true for all price drops but in this situation there is only one reason to drive sales and that is profit, not clearance.
What I am saying is that we should be careful. But maybe I am wrong, but I doubt it since I am conceited. What do you guys think?
Is this the way things are going?
Going to go?
Should be going?
Too long to read?
P.S. I may have missed a point or two. It's a bit late so I didn't really work out my arguments that well.
I want to know what you guys think about all this. Judging from the thread title it should be fairly obvious that I am against the idea of it.
There are many reasons a person could have for wanting physical copies and many of them are in reality arguments that are not really reasonable. Arguments such that sounds something along the lines of "I just want to have it", it just seems to enforce the idea that people who want to have physical copies of media are either; obsessive about having possessions or material goods or the people have some sort of technology related fear.
More reasonable arguments are ones such as the idea that a person may think that if the media in question is only obtainable in one location(XBLA games, Wii console, Steam) and are not copyable that once the service in question is offline they are left without said media. This argument is fair, but it seems like something that is not an imminent issue, it is something that only affects people over the longterm and it has not been really seen yet what truly happens in such a situation.
The best argument I see is that of resale. In most, if not all cases of digital media; you cannot resell the thing you paid for or even return it. Say you buy an Xbox 360, and you buy a bunch of games from XBLA. If you do not like some of them after a while there is nothing you can do, you can not make any of the money back, and in the case of the Microsoft Points it complicates things even more since you are buying the points not the game. Let's say you sell the console, your account with all those games is worthless and will add nothing to the consoles resell price. You can spend $100 on retail games on launch day and a month later maybe get back $60 of it. But spend any amount on most digital media and you could not get a penny back.
Now, games that are on XBLA and even the games on the VC are really not the issues here. Those games are cheap(Adds up though) and most of the time you know if you will like something or not. What concerns me are games like Warhawk and games on Steam. Buying games that retail $50 or so dollars seems like a dangerous idea in the sense that if you dislike the game or it does not work(Steam) you could be facing hundreds of dollars in loss over some period of time.
Example : You buy HL2 from Steam. Your computer specs are too low. What now?
Sell it? Nope. You can "Gift it", but good luck finding a buyer. You can sell your account, assuming you have only the one game.
Return it? Impossible.
So you are stuck with it.
Another scenario, the service where you bought your game goes down. In the case of Steam you are screwed, they 'might' release patches that make the game not rely on Steam but would they have that for the game install too? For XBox games you are fine until the console dies and you try to get your content back. The situation is not as bad for consoles as it is for PCs, yet.
Consoles are going more and more toward a PC standard with things like installs and patches becoming more and more common. Just imagine the consoles as a PC that has a standardized hardware configuration and OS. The PS3 looks like that already, with installs being common and features like a browser and keyboard/mouse support.
The previous scenarios are console specific and do not really apply to things like music, movies and books. The main reason this is true is because there are methods to copying that media easily. More and more is being to make this false but there will always be something to counteract that, or so I hope.
With a console game you cannot copy a game, digital or not, and have it work on an unmodified console.
Digital distribution also kills the second-hand market, this goes hand in hand with reselling. If there is a fully digital market you would never be able to buy something 'below-retail' you would be at the whim of the distributor. You can bet that there would be a scant few. With a product that has not physical footprint it is all to easy to restrict it's sale within certain criteria. My point for this argument : forget this site, CAG is obsolete.
Scenario : A developer makes a game and sends it off to a distributer. They have the option to release in retail. They don't. Digital saves money on packaging, printing discs. All they do is upload some code and modify a site. Really, no cost for them. They price the game at $50. And that is it. They leave it at that price for a year, until the sequel hits. They then lower the price to $40 to drive sales. They have a lot less reason to lower prices, they have no 'inventory' to move. There is no wasted space in some warehouse. The only reason to lower the price is to temporarily drive sales. This is true for all price drops but in this situation there is only one reason to drive sales and that is profit, not clearance.
What I am saying is that we should be careful. But maybe I am wrong, but I doubt it since I am conceited. What do you guys think?
Is this the way things are going?
Going to go?
Should be going?
Too long to read?
P.S. I may have missed a point or two. It's a bit late so I didn't really work out my arguments that well.
digital-only distribution of media. Many great reasons have been listed above:
