Following Valve’s move to distribute their games purely as downloads via STEAM, and not release games on physical media, how will this affect console gamers, if console manufacturers eventually follow this model? There are two main problems I can see, with a host of infrastructural niggles surrounding them.
Firstly, people like to own physical media; to own something palpable. Not only for collecting purposes (for people like us), but because human beings like to have something commensurate for their money. Also, without a manufactured product, something that is just IP floating about in the ether is also much harder to advertise, and also you have to realise that you’ll rarely get impulse buyers (unless your product is a laughably low price, like £2.99 or summit) buying your product.
Secondly, there would be no physical ‘history’ of a game. Without a game getting some sort of release on physical media, the game is more like a foetus than a newborn infant, as it were. For example, you can have 300 games on a HDD, the thing blows up or gets lost, and 300 are gone. If you buy 300 games, they are a lot more difficult to lose, plus they have aesthetic value. Music and movies are different: people are happy to have these exist only on their HDD as you can see movies and hear music all around you. You see trailers on TV and hear music on the radio and MTV. If you don’t buy a game, though, you do not get to see it, 99.999% of the time. Ok, so sites like ours try and add vids and stuff to reviews (as do the big boys like IGN), but you still have to actively look them up – it isn’t a passive process like, say, becoming aware of Star Wars Episode III.
That was a bit of a babble and not very well thought-through, but I think there are some important points there to think about. So, can download-only console games work? How much of a paradigm shift would there have to be for games to be distributed in this way?
It's a short term pop-culturaly thing isn't it? Come 10 years, these servers and services will arguably not exist, so unless they give you the ability to store an offline version perminantly..
I guess Valve's plan is to become the online publisher, or then again maybe its not, maybe they just want to produce what they want to produce without Joe MiddleMan asking why there isn't any Hip Hop references in the game.
I also think the infrastructure isn't good enough to garuntee the service... I mean Half Life 2 is something like 4 gigs to download... that's obscene, and like you say, where are you going to put that?
But what it does enable is more episodic content.. arguably the online publishers could release a "chapter" at a time within there game universe, with tweaks and upgrades to the engine as and when its needed. Which is exactly what Valve are doing.
So essentially you're going to be subscribing to a game instead of buying it, which should also mean it should cost less initially and if you don't like it you don't keep paying for it. But then like with the Halo 2 model, the community has a perpetual peer pressure, everyone has to have the new maps asap or else they lose the advantage.
I agree with Jibber
If this thing does take off (and STEAM is the big test bed) then the direction I would like to see is physical media for the core game code distributed in the normal way for say £5 - £10 then you download additional levels and chapters should you want to.
Naturally this will drive up quality as only the good games will draw the punters
...
You have to wonder.
With the xbox 360 apparently possessing a DVD-R burner, would this mean i could potentially burn LIVE only content/games if i wanted a hardcopy?
Also, is the xbox version of Half Life 2 still being distributed by Vivendi?
I think it is Vivendi still, even after that little hiccup with releasing the PC version a few days early - before Steam would validate the game online.