Steam

[Slothy]

But as some of you acknowledged, broadband is not a reality in a lot of places, more than you would think. What's even scarier is that places without internet at all are not as rare as common sense would had you believe, either. Look up how many Xbox 360 users never sign up for Live and I think you'll start to see my reasoning.

Can't say I blame people for not signing up for XBL with some of the stories I've heard over the years.

But I'm aware of everything you mentioned about the availability of broadband, and internet connections in general throughout the world right now. More aware than the average person without a doubt. But we're not speculating on what's going to happen right now (ie: the next 2-3 years). We're talking about long term what's going to happen, and I fully expect that downloads will have surpassed retail sales withing 10-15 years, and eventually retail sales may be a thing of the past entirely. Digital is already massive on the PC especially compared to retail (though it's too hard to get concrete numbers on digital sales to compare accurately). With broadband connections becoming more and more available, internet coming to new areas everyday, and constant improvement in networking technologies, the expansion of digital sales to the entire world is almost inevitable, even if it's not a reality for everyone, everywhere just yet.

But storage is an issue as well. My PSP collection is considerable, but not large by any means, and I'm already at the point where I have to decide what to keep on its hard drive. Very few titles in my PS3 library have large installs, but those 60 gigs came and went like it was nothing. If we were to live in an environment where ALL of those games would be stored digitally, I just don't know how it could be done, not to mention how much music and video I like to keep on my PS3 as well.

Except it's already being done. Putting aside the obvious fact that 60GB of storage was small even when the PS3 came out let alone now (a 1TB hard drive can easily be had for under $100 these days), the solution to storage issues already exists through services like Steam. I don't even have most of my Steam games installed at the moment to be honest. When you have a consistent and fast internet connection, there's no need to keep everything on your PC when you can readily log into your account and download most games again in minutes, if not an hour or two.

and streaming is a developing solution, but the latter gets back to the internet problem. If universal broadband is even further away than universal internet already is, then universal streaming of HD games and movies is a very distant pipe dream.

I have issues with the idea of streaming and cloud gaming if only because there's no way you can do it yet for the entire experience without considerable lag, particularly online multiplayer. Connections which are fast enough to download a 10-20 GB game in under a few hours are fairly common in urban areas throughout North America at least, and are expanding in coverage all of the time, but the amount of bandwidth and speed it would take to send the control input signals to the game server, stream the content back to you, and communicate with other players is absurd. We're still years away from these being competitive services.

But the common flaw with all of your (except BoB!) arguments is that you seem to believe if one thing is selling well, none of its competitors can sell at all. Much like my argument in the handheld thread, if non-digital products have enough demand, companies will happily produce to meet it.

None of us is arguing that at all. What we're arguing is that digital sales are far better for the developer than retail sales. The fact that they keep substantially more money from every sale is reason enough for them to push in that direction in the future. There's no manufacturing costs, no shipping costs (aside from hosting servers which is dirt cheap by comparison), and you don't have to give a huge cut to a retail store. Why would companies want to keep focusing on retail and getting maybe 10-30% of the money from every sale when they can give 30% to Valve and keep the other 70%? If companies can get people to buy into digital sales (which again, is already happening on the PC) then they will push things in that direction as much as they can. They may still cater to the people who prefer physical copies to some extent, but they would be better off trying to move away from that.

You can talk about how many people like Angry Birds all you like, but that doesn't stop Call of Duty from selling 20 million, Battlefield from selling 10 million, and Skyrim and Uncharted each selling 5 million, all at $60 a pop, in a span of about two months, with all of them releasing in about a three-week window.

This really isn't an argument for physical sales still being popular in the future. Sure those games sold a lot of physical copies. That's because consoles are lagging far behind on digital distribution so if you're going to look at how some of the biggest games of the year sold in their biggest markets, of course people bought physical copies. It was either that or not buy the games at all.

Imagine if you've just bought a book from your local bookstore. Turns out it's a Steam bookstore, though, so all the pages are blank. Everytime you want to read the book, you have to phone the bookstore to activate it. If you get a bad line or they hang up on you, then tough luck - no book for you. You still get to have a big, blank tome taking up space on your bookshelf though.

I don't know if every game does this, and I haven't had a problem registering a game on Steam since, but when I bought Half-Life 2 on day one (physical copy no less) and installed it the Steam servers were too busy to authenticate it. Not a big deal though because they still let you play the single player as much as you wanted until you could connect and authenticate, so who really cared? Now yes, if you're buying a copy digitally and can't get a consistent connection that would be a problem. But it's more than a little naive to think that that will never change.

Also, unless you buy the book the moment it comes out, you won't get to read a single line until it's spent several hours updating. Especially if you've had the misfortune of buying Team Fortress II: The Novel.

This already happens on consoles as well even if you buy physical copies. And speaking only about multiplayer games like TF2 for a moment, you can't play online multiplayer with an outdated version of a game unless the game happens to support dedicated servers and you manage to find one that wasn't updated. Good luck on both of those counts. Automatic updating is also something that you will not see go away. Don't want a single player game to update though so you can play it right away and update when it's convenient? I believe on Steam at least you may be able to turn off automatic updating (I'm not at home now so I can't check), but either way, there's always offline mode.

Finally, you'll occasionally run into an error that prevents you opening the cover of your book. To solve this, you'll have to delete several pages, then replace them. This happened to me the last two times I played Portal 2. Thanks to various Steam-exclusive dicking around, it took about 30-40 minutes from first clicking the game icon to actually earning the privilege of playing the game I'd paid for.

Corruption of installed files can happen to just about any game on any platform. To say this is solely a Steam issue is silly. More importantly, I've never even had it happen to me. I've had games not work do to a bad update sure, but again, that's not a Steam issue. And usually if files are corrupt, checking the integrity of the Steam files through a simple right click menu will be enough to get it to fix it on its own I believe.

But again, as connections get faster and coverage expands more and more I don't see a corrupt game file as being a huge issue if anyone can reinstall the broken files in seconds, or reinstall an entire game in minutes if it really came down to it.

[Loony BoB]

But the common flaw with all of your (except BoB!) arguments is that you seem to believe if one thing is selling well, none of its competitors can sell at all. Much like my argument in the handheld thread, if non-digital products have enough demand, companies will happily produce to meet it.

None of us is arguing that at all. What we're arguing is that digital sales are far better for the developer than retail sales.

Hey, I wasn't arguing that! I was arguing that the Vita/3DS is not the end of handheld gaming and that phones are not going to replace handheld consoles after this generation, which was suggested earlier on. I do think digital sales are going to overwhelm retail sales. My argument was more in line with phones vs. consoles.

You can talk about how many people like Angry Birds all you like, but that doesn't stop Call of Duty from selling 20 million, Battlefield from selling 10 million, and Skyrim and Uncharted each selling 5 million, all at $60 a pop, in a span of about two months, with all of them releasing in about a three-week window.

This really isn't an argument for physical sales still being popular in the future. Sure those games sold a lot of physical copies. That's because consoles are lagging far behind on digital distribution so if you're going to look at how some of the biggest games of the year sold in their biggest markets, of course people bought physical copies. It was either that or not buy the games at all.

While Bolivar might have been arguing the digital vs. retail angle, I can take what he said and use it in the phone vs. console angle... basically just because Angry Birds is selling well doesn't mean that there isn't going to continue to be a valid "tens of millions" market for gaming consoles after the 3DS/Vita generation.

more tl;dr, you guys make me feel like Iceglow sometimes...

Point being, console sales haven't declined considering this generation isn't even over yet, so your point about handhelds supplanting consoles based on sales doesn't hold up.

Touché in that consoles have not sold less over time (PS2 and Xbox sold 177m, PS3/360/Wii sold 202m to date), but the handheld market has surpassed the console market going by generation. The DS and PSP combined have sold 222m units, the PS3, Wii and 360 combined have soled 202m units. This is going by Wikipedia info, so obviously it could be skewed or out of date, but it's still just as reliable as any other random gaming site out there when it comes to information.

So the original point that the handheld market is booming still stands. The 3DS was a terrible launch and it isn't a good way to judge the market in general.

while they may never be as powerful as a dedicated handheld like the Vita at launch, it would be somewhat foolish to think they couldn't be comparable, or even surpass them within a few short years.

While true, I'd say it would also be foolish to assume that they will, and even then, that they will be marketed correctly and people will buy into the concept.

Only the hardcore Nintendo faithful would remain interested in what platform they're developing for, and that is not the market that Nintendo was attracting with the Wii to begin with.

I think that's a pretty bold assumption. The DS sold 150m consoles, yeah? The 3DS was a failconsole only because if you ask most people in the street about it, they'll assume it's just a 3D version of the DS. But so long as Nintendo want to launch another console beyond the 3DS, I can see them doing very well with it. I'm not arguing that phones will never eventually take over, I'm arguing that the Vita + 3DS are not the end of the handheld market.

casual gamers don't care who develops the games

No, but they do care what games they get, and Nintendo make a large number of the games that many people feel are "must have" games. I don't see Nintendo selling the exclusive rights to Pokémon, Mario or Zelda.

Given the number of downloads Angry Birds has had since release this question is moot. It may not compete directly with those games since it is far cheaper and on a completely different platform, but the market has spoken and it is a huge success. It's already competing with them and making Rovio as much money as any of those series bring in in a single release.

Angry Birds was a success. But it's a success because it's an extremely simple game. The backend may be complex for all I know, but it's like saying that Tetris and Snake were incredibly popular on phones some time ago. Complex handheld games are not successful on phones yet. They will probably be later on, but I just don't see this happening before another generation flows through.

You and me are of the same mind, but I don't know that most consumers are.

But we are proof that there is an ongoing demand for handheld consoles rather than phones that are capable of gaming. And so long as there is a demand, and we are two of many I am sure, there will be a product.

The other big deal is that a phone that plays games also does dozens of other things. People aren't buying a phone that plays games. They are buying a phone with internet access, GPS, app capability and ultra-multi-functionality. The fact that it plays games is ancillary, but ultimately has the large effect of making other handhelds look less attractive.

Outside of holding a console to the side of your face so you can make a voice call, I see no reason that the Vita etc. can't continue to evolve and become capable of doing everything that a phone can do. The success of the Kindle and iPad also adds to the idea that there is a demand for large-screen products. I have no doubt in my mind that eventually we will be able to make video calls, send emails/text messages and work on documents using something created by Nintendo or Sony that is (primarily) a gaming console. You could say "but that's basically just a smartphone!" - if it does everything, it does everything. A phone is just a phone. I can make phonecalls using my computer. Does that make it a phone? No. The primary purpose of a gaming console will remain gaming, but it will have that added functionality that phones and tablets both provide. It'll just be the "midway point" between phone and tablet. Portable as a phone, powerful as a gaming console, functional as a tablet. But with the buttons a gaming console would otherwise have. Touchscreen for typing.

I think you're underestimating the quality. I certainly did before I had one. You realize there are ports of games like Secret of Mana and FFIII, right? There's a game called Mage Gauntlet that's iOS only and it's basically a SoM type game and it's great. Then there are games like Infinity Blade and its upcoming sequel (which looks like it adds a ton more depth).

Not only are there pretty decent and deep games, but games like Infinity Blade take advantage of the control scheme and uses it in an idiomatic way. The Dead Space game for iOS was also incredibly deep with amazing controls (really no functionality was lacking compared to DS2) and it added to the storyline.

Not all games are Angry Birds or Tiny Wings. There are lot of great games.

Yes, but how many of these ports are selling to the number of one or two million? I'll concede that some of those games are better than I'd thought, but having them out there and having people want to buy them on the phone rather than a console is a big ask. And let's face it, FFIII is pretty far away from today's PSP and DS games.

[Slothy]

I think that's a pretty bold assumption. The DS sold 150m consoles, yeah? The 3DS was a failconsole only because if you ask most people in the street about it, they'll assume it's just a 3D version of the DS. But so long as Nintendo want to launch another console beyond the 3DS, I can see them doing very well with it. I'm not arguing that phones will never eventually take over, I'm arguing that the Vita + 3DS are not the end of the handheld market.

I wasn't arguing that they are the end of the handheld market. What I am arguing though is that it is entirely possible we will see sales of dedicated handhelds start to fall now that they aren't the only game in town. Especially when you consider that the casual market was what was really driving a lot of those sales over the years. The DS was popular sure, but it was casual game sales that drove it once the Lite and games like Brain Age were released (I trout you not, looking at the quarterly sales for all regions on Wikipedia, total sales for the DS more than doubled in the last half of 2006 alone. The DS Lite was released in North America and Europe in June, and Brain Age in April of that year). Even my parents bought DS's for those sorts of titles and they are not gamers. They also now have iPhones and the like instead, which they're already going to buy and own anyway without taking games into account. Casual gamers are what made the DS sell as well as it did, largely because now there was a handheld with a dirt simple control scheme that even my mom could use without freaking out, and simpler games aimed at that audience were released in abundance. The same thing happened with the Wii as well. The difference being that 5+ years ago there was nothing else for that market. But now a lot of them have smart phones anyway, so why pay more for a handheld when they already take that everywhere and the games are cheaper?

No, but they do care what games they get, and Nintendo make a large number of the games that many people feel are "must have" games. I don't see Nintendo selling the exclusive rights to Pokémon, Mario or Zelda.

Yeah, but again, that's people like us, not the casual market they tapped into almost by accident with the DS. There's a reason that despite selling around 80 million Wii's and 150 million DS's, games like Mario Galaxy and Zelda, while they sell well, don't sell any better than AAA games on other consoles with smaller user bases, and don't even come close to things like Wii Fit or Brain Age, and certainly don't compare to the uptake rate of things like Farmville and Angry Birds. The casual gaming market in general doesn't care about Nintendo's long standing fanchises. They want shorter, simpler games that they can play in short play sessions then put down. This is especially true of gaming on handheld devices. Something they can already get on their phone which is convenient since they already carry that all the time anyway, for less money, and without any real dip in quality.

Complex handheld games are not successful on phones yet. They will probably be later on, but I just don't see this happening before another generation flows through.

I never tried to claim otherwise. But again, that's a type of game that doesn't matter to a lot of the people who bought the Wii and the DS. I wouldn't be surprised if with this handheld generation we see Sony gain massive amounts of ground, or even overtake Nintendo entirely and not just because of a lackluster launch (in all honesty, as bad as the launch was, they've corrected most of the problems months ago, and with Nintendo's habit of releasing new versions of handhelds there's no reason to believe that one bad launch will keep them from recovering). I honestly think that casual gamers are not going to see as much value in a dedicated handheld anymore when they can get the game experience that they want on a phone. I also think you underestimate just how much this market may have driven DS sales. If they jump ship to the next new thing (and there's no reason to believe they won't), I don't think Nintendo will be as successful in the handheld market as last time.

[Yeargdribble]

The problem I'm seeing with the arguments against digital distribution and phone saturation comes down to basically one thing. Bolivar and BoB are both using the state of current hardware and infrastructure to show why these things won't be possible right now. I'm looking ahead and making predictions based on the direction some things are going.

Sure, phone games aren't as impressive right now and don't sell comparably to handhelds, but they've made significant progress in the last year or two and I see no reason that trend will end any time soon and as the gap closes, the market will be a lot more split to the detriment of handhelds. The strongest point you've probably got is in terms of exclusive titles. Nintendo's only trump card at the moment is Zelda and Mario games that are going to push me and a lot of other people to finally buckle and buy a 3DS. I do wonder if those characters are going to continue to have enough cachet in the future to be system sellers though. Like I said, I'm seeing more and more kids with DS and large libraries of tripe that don't include any Mario or Zelda titles... or really any of the titles you and I think of as deep, quality gaming experiences.

I'll admit my argument against the future of handhelds is quite speculative, but I feel that the argument for digital distribution is far stronger looking at current trends. We've already moved so much toward it. The hardware issues Bolivar mentioned seem irrelevant. Hell, I bought a 2 TB hard drive a few months back for less than $100. It's hard to buy even a cheap computer these days with less than a 1 TB HDD. Citing the 60 gigs of space on the earliest iterations of the PS3 is one of the most spurious arguments I've seen in this thread.

The stronger point is about broadband infrastructure. I certainly sympathize because I used to live in an area where dial-up was the only option... when HL2 came out. It made Steam a huge problem. I realize that even currently not everyone has access to fairly priced high speed internet, but as we get to a point where the majority do, there will be less catering to those who don't just like there was no catering to me back when HL2 came out and I didn't have an "always on" connection.

That brings me to Big D's complaints about Steam? Those problems sound outdated and rare.

Imagine if you've just bought a book from your local bookstore. Turns out it's a Steam bookstore, though, so all the pages are blank. Everytime you want to read the book, you have to phone the bookstore to activate it. If you get a bad line or they hang up on you, then tough luck - no book for you. You still get to have a big, blank tome taking up space on your bookshelf though.

If you have a decent internet connection, this is a non-issue. I've been using Steam almost daily for the last several years and never run into this sort of issue and I have the ability to play offline if I need it.

Also, unless you buy the book the moment it comes out, you won't get to read a single line until it's spent several hours updating. Especially if you've had the misfortune of buying Team Fortress II: The Novel.

You can sit in the comfort of your house waiting for it to download for an hour or you can drive around town a similar amount of time picking it up and coming home with it where you'll probably have to deal with some installation time.

Finally, you'll occasionally run into an error that prevents you opening the cover of your book. To solve this, you'll have to delete several pages, then replace them. This happened to me the last two times I played Portal 2. Thanks to various Steam-exclusive dicking around, it took about 30-40 minutes from first clicking the game icon to actually earning the privilege of playing the game I'd paid for.

In my years of using Steam, this hasn't happened to me once. The fact that you rarely use Steam and it happened to you sounds like bad luck. This isn't a very strong argument against Steam.

But it's far too prone to errors, and far too picky about when you're allowed to play your own games.

Simply not true. If this were generally true than Steam wouldn't be the popular platform it is. The gaming community at large doesn't have much patience for crappy services that give headaches. I think Steams longevity and dominance says a lot about how many people actually have these problems with any regularity.

[Slothy]

spent several hours updating

I only just now noticed this part of Big D's post while I was reading Yearg's response, and this is just blatant hyperbole. Sure, IF you went out and bought a game today which was released 3+ years ago and had been updated dozens of times with GB's of extra content including maps, weapons, new gameplay modes, engine updates, bug fixes, etc. then it might take a few hours to update even on a broadband connection. The point is somewhat moot as I already said because you can't play a multiplayer game without updating anyway and you could play a single player game offline until updating is more convenient (though I have to say, complaining about having to wait a few hours to enjoy the massive content updates that something like TF2 has enjoyed over the years seems a bit ridiculous to me. Sure it may delay your enjoyment for a bit, but you get a vastly expanded game for your trouble). But realistically, I've never waited more than a few minutes tops for a game to update. Even after weeks of not playing something or even opening Steam, or after a large 1GB+ update, I've never waited more than maybe 10 minutes to play something. And usually, I'll just sit down at my computer, start Steam, and let it do anything it has to do while I do my usual rounds at the websites I visit.

Like Yearg said, some of you are looking at these things like here are the problems with these things happening right now which will keep it from happening anytime soon, while he and I have been spending the whole time talking about what we feel is going to happen 10+ years down the road when many of these issues will have long since been addressed for the majority of the population.

Actually, I guess arguing that most people will have broadband in about 10 years could be a bit generous, but only because tele communications companies are dicks.

[Bolivar]

I think you guys are actually arguing this:

But the common flaw with all of your (except BoB!) arguments is that you seem to believe if one thing is selling well, none of its competitors can sell at all.

Because the only thing that will make digital distribution the exclusive means to purchase games is demand. It just doesn't matter how easy or profitable it is for developers. And I think the numbers show that the 100 million+ demographic of enthusiastic gamers vastly and inarguably prefer physical copies to digital distribution channels. It's not because that's the only option - there are a lot of digital channels to choose from nowadays, hell, even Microsoft and Sony now have considerable retail titles for download on the store.

Hell, I bought a 2 TB hard drive a few months back for less than $100. It's hard to buy even a cheap computer these days with less than a 1 TB HDD. Citing the 60 gigs of space on the earliest iterations of the PS3 is one of the most spurious arguments I've seen in this thread.

Do you mean an external hard drive? In any case, I think you missed my point: those 60 gigs went to not even a flash of a fragment of my PS3 collection. Keep in mind that I buy a lot of PS3 exclusives, and there's a growing circle of games that have filled up a double-layered Blu Ray (50GBs), and many more that have either filled up a single layer or enter double-layer territory. This is all compounded by the fact that games are getting bigger and bigger every year, and they'll be even larger next generation. If I had to choose between downloading the 50 Gigabytes of Metal Gear Solid 4 or buying the disc, I would buy the disc every time. And that gets back to your demand dilemma above.

Being that console gaming is many times more popular than PC gaming, I think it shows that in this medium, the playing field is not amenable as movies or music. When I'm having people over, we may want to play a couple races of Motorstorm, do some couch co-op of Killzone 3, go online with Call of Duty, or experiment a little bit in Little Big Planet. We simply can't do that if I have to decide which game to delete and then wait a few hours to download several, if not 20-30 GB. This is where Streaming comes back into the picture, but I think that's another topic.

Back to the original topic: I love Steam, and my PSP buying/gaming habits are very similar. So that's two of my favorite platforms where my content is exclusively digital. But digital just can't satisfy all of my gaming needs, and there's tens of millions of people who agree with me. We're not going to stop playing Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, and Metal Gear simply because "Match the Cakes" is now $0.99 on the iOS App Store!

[Yeargdribble]

Do you mean an external hard drive?

No. Internal. My past couple of 2 TB HDDs have been internal and the price has been decreasing at a remarkable rate.

In any case, I think you missed my point: those 60 gigs went to not even a flash of a fragment of my PS3 collection. Keep in mind that I buy a lot of PS3 exclusives, and there's a growing circle of games that have filled up a double-layered Blu Ray (50GBs), and many more that have either filled up a single layer or enter double-layer territory. This is all compounded by the fact that games are getting bigger and bigger every year, and they'll be even larger next generation. If I had to choose between downloading the 50 Gigabytes of Metal Gear Solid 4 or buying the disc, I would buy the disc every time. And that gets back to your demand dilemma above.

You have a point about the content inflating alongside the media, but that really introduces another problem I wonder about in terms of how the hell the industry is going to be able to keep up without adjusting their pricing model.

Being that console gaming is many times more popular than PC gaming, I think it shows that in this medium, the playing field is not amenable as movies or music. When I'm having people over, we may want to play a couple races of Motorstorm, do some couch co-op of Killzone 3, go online with Call of Duty, or experiment a little bit in Little Big Planet. We simply can't do that if I have to decide which game to delete and then wait a few hours to download several, if not 20-30 GB. This is where Streaming comes back into the picture, but I think that's another topic.

While I think ONLive is going to flop in the long term, I do think cloud stuff is going to be incorporated to fix a lot of these problems. If more companies learn to manage their game data like Blizzard it will be even less of a problem. You can download the WoW trial and it can load in the background. It will start by installing things you MUST have and continue loading as you play giving priority to things that are important to the location you are in.

A combination of better internet, larger storage, cloud computing and that type of smart streaming tech will end up fixing a lot of these problems.

Back to the original topic: I love Steam, and my PSP buying/gaming habits are very similar. So that's two of my favorite platforms where my content is exclusively digital. But digital just can't satisfy all of my gaming needs, and there's tens of millions of people who agree with me. We're not going to stop playing Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, and Metal Gear simply because "Match the Cakes" is now $0.99 on the iOS App Store!

I'm with you in every way except that I don't think Assassin's Creed and iOS games are mutually exclusive. But currently the streaming and digtal pickings aren't enough for me either.

[Bolivar]

No. Internal. My past couple of 2 TB HDDs have been internal and the price has been decreasing at a remarkable rate.

Damn... that's insane.

While I think ONLive is going to flop in the long term, I do think cloud stuff is going to be incorporated to fix a lot of these problems. If more companies learn to manage their game data like Blizzard it will be even less of a problem. You can download the WoW trial and it can load in the background. It will start by installing things you MUST have and continue loading as you play giving priority to things that are important to the location you are in.

You know, I actually did this when a friend of mine went back to WoW, he told me about the "up-to-level-20" demo, and I was actually pretty impressed with this (the game as well, I never got into WoW). I think maybe something like this along with an a la carte model could solve it. For example, you could choose which parts of the game (single player, co-op, multiplayer) to keep on the drive. I could see that helping the situation.

I'm with you in every way except that I don't think Assassin's Creed and iOS games are mutually exclusive. But currently the streaming and digtal pickings aren't enough for me either.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see. But with the way quality in gaming has gone this generation, I'm not so sure.

[Rostum]

I'm a collector, and I love collecting physical copies of games. But at the same time I also really love Steam, and I definitely think digital distribution is going to be playing a much, much larger role in the industry. Even with physical copies we are starting to see it, with things like DLC whereas in the past you would have had to go out and buy a physical expansion disc.

I honestly don't think a lot of gamers care too much about physical copies. Show me some real stats to prove me wrong, but with the popularity of Steam it seems the case. I see most users have around 200+ games in their Steam library. Probably a lot more, actually.

The reason I love Steam is I can get games I would never really buy physically since they have such awesome sales on all the time, and in general the prices are about half the price than at the store here. Hard drive space is no issue, since internal hard drives are incredibly cheap these days. Bandwidth isn't an issue, even in Australia's really expensive climate the Internet I have is incredible and doesn't cost much.

In the three years I've been using Steam I have not once had a single problem with logging on, downloading updates fast, or being able to play any of the games I have.

I'm definitely with Yeargdribble on this one.

[Slothy]

Because the only thing that will make digital distribution the exclusive means to purchase games is demand. It just doesn't matter how easy or profitable it is for developers.

Demand is part of it, but I see no reason to believe that developers and publishers won't continue to develop the digital marketplace and try to convert as many people as they can. It's already working on PC and it is far better for them. And in the long run, the number of people who prefer a physical copy to a digital copy will only go down, not up.

And I think the numbers show that the 100 million+ demographic of enthusiastic gamers vastly and inarguably prefer physical copies to digital distribution channels. It's not because that's the only option - there are a lot of digital channels to choose from nowadays, hell, even Microsoft and Sony now have considerable retail titles for download on the store.

No, that doesn't show it at all really. You cannot argue that big AAA titles selling well at retail on release shows that retail is in higher demand than digital and always will be, particularly when these titles are not available via digital distribution. Yes, Sony and Microsoft sell games over XBL and the PSN. They're even selling full retail titles that way now too. Except every retail title released thus far on PSN that I've seen has been at least a year old, and well past it's prime in terms of sales. Everything else they sell on those are indie titles, or smaller titles from bigger developers and publishers, and none of them would ever compete directly with the AAA stuff in terms of sales, not to even mention the complete lack of storage space you already mentioned on these consoles. Add in the fact that when it comes to digital sales they're both years behind Steam and you're basically trying to compare the retail console market to a digital market that doesn't even really exist yet.

If you were to look at a much more relevant comparison you'd look at the rise of digital sales on the PC versus retail sales. And you can not tell me honestly that retail has anywhere near the demand lead on PC that it does on the PS3 where it has no real competition.

[Loony BoB]

I wasn't arguing that they are the end of the handheld market. What I am arguing though is that it is entirely possible we will see sales of dedicated handhelds start to fall now that they aren't the only game in town.

In that case, you were never arguing with me to begin with as I totally agree. My big long speel began due to the following...

A lot of people are getting the feeling that dedicated gaming handhelds are becoming a thing of the past. I personally don't expect to see another generation of them beyond 3DS and Vita (and their multiple iterations). If there is another generation it will almost certainly be digital only, but I think the phone market will kill gaming handhelds.

...which I disagreed with. =] But it's cool. We'll see how things go over the next ten years, I guess!

[Yeargdribble]

I honestly don't think a lot of gamers care too much about physical copies.

I get this feeling too. I don't buy my games used and I don't sell my games. Most people I run into seem to have constant flow in and out. A week after they buy it used they sell it to buy another used game. Either that or they used a Gamefly type service.

Damn... that's insane.

Yeah, as a guy who buys a lot of hard drives, I'm really impressed and amazed. There was a 3 TB for $100 on Black Friday. I figure as SSD becomes more common, the old spinny disc types are getting stupid cheap and that's fine by me because I use a lot of space.


@BoB

We'll see. I certainly admit I could be wrong. I even personally feel a bit hasty on that particular prediction, but at the same time don't feel like it's totally unreasonable as fast as things have been changing and given the lifecycle of handhelds.

If they don't go away in 5 years, they will certainly change into something significantly different (not simply a dedicated portable gaming device that only plays portable games made for it).

I'll be happy to eat lots of crow in half a decade when you dig up this thread and quote me to show me how silly I was.

[Slothy]

In that case, you were never arguing with me to begin with as I totally agree. My big long speel began due to the following...

I should probably clarify that a bit to be "I wasn't arguing that they are the end of the handheld market" right now. But as the technology develops and more of the market moves to phones for mobile gaming, I don't see it as a matter of them never being able to kill the dedicated gaming handheld, even if the dedicated handheld becomes a more game focused phone.

Frankly, it would take so little on the hardware end to make phones competitive with handhelds in the long run that the only thing that will decide what happens is how much the market for dedicated handhelds contracts due to the extra competition.

But if we look at it as a question of what I would like to see happen: I'd love more gaming oriented smart phones, and I'd love if such a concept replaced handhelds completely. I already own several handhelds and a smart phone, and I only take one of those everywhere. So I really do agree with Yearg that there's a strong possibility we'll see the market start shifting more and more in the smart phone and tablet direction over the coming years to the point that dedicated handhelds will become unnecessary.

[Bolivar]

If they don't go away in 5 years, they will certainly change into something significantly different (not simply a dedicated portable gaming device that only plays portable games made for it).

They've already made that change, though. The 3DS has Netflix streaming and probably a lot more to come in the future. The Vita is essentially a tablet. And the PSP has been a great MP3/video player, as well web browser and comic viewer for many years now.

Also, I just wanted to add that this guy tweeted that "Steam is a much more closed platform than PSN. Yes, I was surprised too." Not putting it out there or using it to say anything, I just thought you guys might find it interesting

Overall I think this discussion has read its course, good exchange, guys!