Unless you're a gigantic multi-billion-dollar games retailer! In light of our conversation, I thought these comments from a GameDaily interview with GameStop CEO Dan DeMatteo were timely. And kind of ludicrous.
The first digital distribution was Napster and it was illegal. Let's just start there. The software publishers are afraid to death of piracy. Once a full game is lying on a hard drive, there's the potential for piracy. Aside from the games, the bandwidth, etc., our studies have concluded that the network won't be in place to do digital distribution of full games until 2020 to 2025. And that's using today's size, but as consoles get more powerful, games get bigger. Right now, a 30GB game with your best T1 line is about 72 hours to do it.
...What?
I don't even know where to start with this. Hey, software publishers were also afraid of piracy when you could burn a CD or DVD for your friend, or copy a stack of floppy disks and photocopy a manual before returning a game to the store. In other words, they've always been afraid of piracy. And saying there won't be the infrastructure in place to distribute full games online for another decade? Dude, that infrastructure is here now. Do you really need to pull up the Steam games list to see all the very sizeable games you can pull down in a matter of hours? BioShock? Company of Heroes? Last I checked, those are pretty serious video games, and you can go buy those online right now. And sure, games are going to get bigger, but have you noticed home Internet connections are also getting fast as hell? My $60-per-month Comcast service will pull darn near 2 megabytes a second when Steam is feeling especially feisty. Bandwidth is going to scale with file size. Technology is not the issue here.
To me, these comments read with a mixture of arrogance and fear, the same way the recording industry demonized and fought the MP3 movement for so many years, instead of figuring out a way to harness that brilliant tech and make money with it. Then they let Apple show up and run away with all the profits. GameStop ain't going anywhere anytime soon--a lot of people still like to own a physical thing and will continue driving to the mall to do so--but there's an awful lot of money to be had in the online space, and acting like this is not a viable business model is just silly.
Thanks in part to Microsoft's fairly amazing Summer of Arcade, I've been playing way more downloaded games lately than retail ones. And personally, I'd be happy if I got every PC game over Steam from now on, and I'd be just as willing to buy full console games once that hardware is more suited to the task. Heck, you already kind of can on the PlayStation 3. A game of Warhawk, anyone?