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PoV: It's not the end of traditional retail outlets |
Listed in: PS3, Xbox 360, PC Gaming Tags: Electronic Arts, opinion
Digital distribution is undoubtedly set to overtake physical game copies. However, that is not to say that the two cannot share a spot under the same sky.
EA's CFO Eric Brown pretty much shares the same observation, expressing that he believes traditional retail outlets will remain to play an integral play in the market, at least for the "foreseeable future."
His statement was made during a presentation to investors and analysts alike, which took place earlier this week at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference.
Said Brown, "You need a retail partner to stock the consoles. I don't see all consoles being ordered via mail. There's going to be people that go in and want to see the display, the form factors, etc."
He then went on to cite the example of Sony and how they went wrong with the PSPgo. Sony's much-hyped handheld basically went stale, simply because it went all digital, totally foregoing the option of a physical media.
"If you were toc ompletely eliminate physical distribution of the disc," explained Brown, "the margin opportunity is lost in the entire category. To the retailer, holistically it radically alters their view of the cateogry. So it's for that reason that I just don't see in the foreseeable future a complete shift to digital gaming delivery."
Much discussion has been made on this particular evolution in the gaming industry, but at this point, I would have to agree with Brown. Despite people being all digitally attached, there still remains that compulsion, that desire, to have a product in physical form. Not to make it too philosophical, but I guess it has something to do with physical possession that re-affirms ownership of an item.
It should be a good while before people fully divest themselves of their need to obtain physical copies of their games or movies, even music. They may be at a downturn, but I don't think media in its physical form will ever disappear. Even publisher Sega recently made the same observation, as well as Peter Moore.
Electronic Arts themselves recently went full throttle in their digital campaign, opening up their EA Origins. They even got involved in this "mild" tussle with leading online distributor, Steam, over distribution of their games.
Via [Gamasutra]
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Comments
no it's not
-Sony just started selling Playstation 3/PSP in Brazil. The internet there is so bad, a lot of people rely on satellite dishes. It's still illegal for Sony to sell their system's in China, so if they want to still let people import them, they can't rely on PSN as it doesn't get through the great firewall of China. There are still places here (Canada/US) that don't get broadband cause it's too costly for companies to build it. There are people on this forum stuck with dialup, and it's not by choice or because they're too poor like idiots like Naquiel like to claim.
-PSP go told Sony gamers don't want to go that route. It was a colossal failure.
OnLive is also failing. Their $100 microconsole now comes free with some $50 games.
And retailers revolted against both of those products. Retailers are still required to sell the system.
-Games are getting bigger. A lot bigger. WiiU even uses 25GB Blurays. Playstation 3 has a few 50GB games. Can you imagine how much bigger next gen is going to be? One of our users complain it takes overnight to download Playstation 3's 150MB firmware updates. And then there are the storage costs. Don't forget, when my Playstation 3 died, I had to redownload all my PSN games and it took so much bandwidth it went over my monthly quota. And that was just PSN games. Imagine if those were full games.
It's simply not going to happen any time soon.
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That has never changed. Regardless of whatever idiot in the media has said otherwise. (points at pratcher)
"Digital distribution is undoubtedly set to overtake physical game copies."
That's only true if you look at all markets. For example, if you include such things as Apple App downloads. Granted there is no physical copy to compare but they are digital downloads and they certainly take a big chunk out of gaming.
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