Another One Bites the Dust

Console gaming has gotten to the point where casual gamers have shifted from PC games to console games.

Seriously, all the people I know who used to buy pc games because they were 'better' than the stuff on consoles dont even bother. Upgrading is too expensive, there are too many bugs and weird problems no one has time to deal with. Buy an xbox or ps2 and you have access to a shitload of great games that match the PC in fun level.

It makes absolute sense to me that console games are eating away at PC game shelf space. You pop a disc in, it works. No bullshit, no stupid copyright protection, no online verification, no bugs (most the time). People are busy, no one has time to put up with the shit that infests the PC market and that publishers think they can get away with.

Has anyone actually gone to a Best Buy or Wal-Mart recently?

Their PC game section is PATHETIC. Has all the recent releases and a few lesser known ones but that's it. There's only like 2 rows dedicated to it and it used to be like 4 or something. Very few old games like Halo & KOTOR but that's it. That and current movie/tv tie-ins which are 100% garbage save for Riddick. Wal-Mart of course sells even less than this.

Gamestop doesn't even sell PC games in stores anymore nor sell preowned ones.

It's dead, Jim. :/

Indeed, the online distribution model is a great way to get games, but there's another problem with it that seems to be overlooked. There are 242 countries besides the US. Same price doesn't work in all countries.

ok, so if you're like me and you'd like to support independent stores like this, and you're not ready to go all online distribution yet, then how do you even find stores like this? Is there a search engine anywhere?

And, for those of us that live in the DFW area, is there a Red Devil-like store anywhere around?

FUCK, I remember the original article and I had meant to go stop off at the store sometime, it was within 30 mins of me. Damit, I'm sorry I missed out, I wanted to help out the owner :(

Damn Remo, you really are the best addition to the Shack, ever. You give this place a legitimacy that didn't exist before - you're almost like a real reporter. Keep up the great work!

From an American perspective, I don't see purely online distribution for consoles or PCs happening anytime soon.

Sure, there are many benefits to exclusive online distribution: developers can completely circumvent the publisher-developer relationship and reap the majority of the profit themselves, developers would no longer need to live in fear of the publisher's bottom line, and games could be released as soon as the gold build is certified.

Cutting out the publisher would be a major benefit to the developer, as many publishing companies are more and more becoming a hindrance for a developer (in less polite terms: a greedy, money-sucking abstraction that only acts to reap profit, inconsiderate of a developer's vision or product quality).

Online distribution would allow for many great games, games that would normally not see the light of day, to get into players' hands. Players get good games and developers make money, everyone benefits.

However, in America, there are a lot of potential drawbacks, even ignoring hardware limitations on the console side of things (limited storage capacity or complete lack of storage capacity being the biggest bone of contention).

First and foremost is the lack of robust broadband in many areas. Sure, you may be able to get a 5mb/s connection on the cheap in NYC or LA, but some places don't even have broadband yet. Some cities (such as my own) have extremely limited broadband connections that would make downloading (or redownloading) multi-gig games prohibitive.

Some people don't even have internet connections.

Another problem is that many publishers currently own popular development companies outright, or if they don't own the development company itself, they own all intellectual property rights and publishing rights to the games their developers produce.

If these publishers don't switch to an online distribution model, brick and mortar game retail is here for the long haul, even if the business becomes so cutthroat that it shuts out any independent entities. And unless hard copies of games suddenly outpace their sticker price, Wal*Mart, Best Buy and others will be around to sell games for a long while.

Then there are smaller factors, such as piracy prevention (people are going to pirate the game no matter how hard you try to stop them) which runs the risk of encouraging the inclusion of restrictive DRM. This risk is especially high if the current publishers switch to online distribution. I don't like the idea of needing to phone home every time I want to play a game I have legally purchased.

Then, of course, some people simply demand a hard copy of their game (I'm one of those people, a physical disc and a physical instruction manual are great, PDF instruction manuals can bite me).

I'm sure I'm failing to address other concerns as well, but I haven't really given online distribution a thorough analysis.

Still, I do see online distribution on the PC platform taking off in the next few years, many of the pros far outweigh the cons, especially for independent or start-up developers. In fact, we're already seeing online distribution start to (slowly) take off through Steam (re: Darwinia, Sin Episodes). Though, not everyone likes Steam. Then again, they might need to learn to like Steam if retailers start pushing the PC games off the shelves to make room for the latest piece of shovelware.

Consoles are another beast. With my game collections, one hard drive is laughably inadequate to support online distribution, especially at the current sizes for the Xbox, 360, and PS2 hard drives. It works for games like Geometry Wars and Smash TV, it wouldn't work for Project Gotham Racing 3 or Call of Duty 2.

Online distribution works well in Korea were every computer owner and every internet cafe have access to high quality, high speed broadband. It can work in America, too, once we all have good internet connections.

Of course, in Korea, piracy is so rampant that if developers want to make a profit, they need to release the game for free and charge a monthly fee to play. That has its own shortcommings.

The only real way to open a pc games store is by tricking the end user into not knowing its a pc games store.

So really the next gen console is....Phantom?!

I think digital distro is the wave of the future, as broadband speeds seem to be outpacing download sizes, overall.

Pendant warning, though: I've been seeing "jive" being used a lot lately, when "jibe" is the correct term in this context. It wouldn't be such a big deal if "jive" didn't mean the *opposite* of "jibe.*

retail will disappear in the same way that people will stop buying EAs regurgitated sports titles each year, and the sims will stop charging straight to number one on the sales list each time an expansion comes out. gimme a break.

this is up there with people in the middle of a hurricane suggesting the world is coming to an end; because their little part of the sky is falling, it must be happening globally.

get some perspective for fucks sake.

>Grissom has a point, but it's still difficult to imagine game retail completely disappearing.

maybe the big production games will be distributed online and the lesser/casual/value games will be prominent in retail...sort of a flip of the way things are now.

Retail outlets will never go away, and to even entertain the possibility of an industry dominated by digital distribution is just fanboy fantasy. The people who imagine a world where brick and mortar outlets have vanished are not living in the real world. Most consumers want some hard copy of their purchases and there will always be people who prefer to shop in stores and like to buy used copies of games. There will always be a market for stores that sell you hard goods.

Digital distribution is just going to be one aspect of an expanding market.

I used to buy $15 games at Waldenbooks and I bought my shareware copies of Duke Nukem and Commander Keen at Osco Drug for $5. We didn't have an Electronics Boutique or a Babbages. There were two local computer stores that sold games as an afterthought. This was almost 15 years ago and my hometown STILL doesn't have an EB. Anyone still living there would probably jump through hoops to have a Red Devil around.

This is why I think it was a GREAT move buy the shareholders or whoever of EB sold out to Gamestop. Retail is goin down, and I would of sold it too.

"I never loved you!"

May you rest in peace Red Devil. Nameless EB's and GameStop's thrive while the best and the craziest of the bunch bites the dust. Such a shame. >:(