EMA: Digital Downloads won't match retail until 2015, at least |
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Internet connections are getting faster and faster every year, digital
downloading services are raking it in hand over fist, and a growing number of games are choosing to release without the benefit of a retail component. Most recently, the Xbox Live Marketplace and the PlayStation Network have provided the impetus for even greater leaps and bounds in the growth of the digital downloading industry.
All these things considered, it's easy to assume that retail may very well become a thing of the past very soon.
Not quite, says Bo Andersen, President and CEO of the Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA). He mentioned during a meeting with the Content Delivery and Storage Association (CDSA) and the MEDIA-TECH Association (MTA):
Digital distribution certainly will be a significant part of the entertainment industry in the future, but our predictions are that packaged media will continue to dominate the home video sector until 2015 at least.
Contributing to his somewhat conservative view on the industry was probably a recent survey conducted by the EMA and the CDSA. The results, covered in one of our previous articles, led Andersen to the conclusion that gamers consider game packages to be an integral part of the full value of a product.
The EMA is co-producer of "The Future of Packaged Media '09," which will be presented February 3 to 4, 2009 at the Hilton Los Angeles in Universal City, CA.
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Comments [refresh]
Storage, that's all I have to say.. I'm sure it doesn't matter much now, and it will probably be solved by this 2015 date, but games are also bigger. Not too long ago were we playing games in kilobytes, now we're at gigabytes! ROMs, then CDs (~800 Megabytes), then DVDs (~4.7 gigabytes), then dual-layer (~8.5 gigabytes), and now Blu-Ray. Theoretically, digital downloads will eliminate size restrictions, but consumers will have to spend a lot more time downloading.. I personally dislike downloading.. I like to have a physical copy of the game to bring over to my friends' houses or something. But maybe with all of this emphasis on online play (too much emphasis unfortunately to the point where games get canceled for not having online LIKE THE GETAWAY =[) people will just stay at home and play with their friends that way.
There is no way that digital download of content won't pass physical shipments in less than 3 years. I give it to 2012. Think about the software industry, even though the vast majority of consumers still bought shrinkwrap software for 10 years after licensing and digital downloads were pervausive, the corporate world switched within 2 years. In 1998 Software Spectrum was shipping 70% of it's product stilll PHYSICALLY, and I mean in the form of nice little foam and shrinkwrapped boxes with 19 wheeler trucks to corporations. By 2000, more than 90% was "shipping", if you could call it that, in the form of a license to copy software, with literally ONE DISK being shipped (or better yet, downloaded) to a single corporate site, and 1,000's upon 1,000's of users accessing that single download of software.
The only reason consumers have never been able to jump this same curve is there as never been a single simple download site where anyone could access ANYTHING that is downloadable, in the way of content.
I think that can change.
Visit. www.contentrealtime.com
Jim D