We’re going digital baby! – Part 1 – Distribution
As the general shopping window now has been, or is, depending on if you got gift cards, need to return stuff or are just enjoying the sales, the thought came into mind to talk about shopping. I’m sure there’s a female-directed sexist joke in here somewhere too, but let’s leave that out for now.
So, what’s one of the most important things with games? I mean, besides marketing, PR, boasting and actually making a damn decent game? And yes, if you answered ‘the boxart’ her
e, I’m going to go ahead and call you wrong. The distribution of course! This is something that has long presented (see what I did there?) an issue for me, because I am a collector. I like to have those big rows of games stacked in my shelves. This however used to be a problem back in the day when the games, for some reason, felt the need to have the size of a small encyclopedia and take up an unreasonable amount of space. Due to the technology of innovation (or innovation of technology?) we got the slim DVD-esque cases that made it even more possible for me to collect more and more whilst needing less space.
As we evolved as a sentient race and achieved great advances, we happened to stumble over the Internet. It was after all found and has always existed, not created, everyone knows this. This created a shift in how we enjoyed games and gave the option to be able to play together with people we’ve never seen, in countries we’ve never been to and talking in a language we probably didn’t know existed (and allowed us to make up one too).
This also seems to have shifted how we interact with each others as gamers. Instead of getting together as two friends or a couple of buddies, it’s faster and requires less planning to simply hook up via the internet, and the ‘getting together’ aspect feels somewhat abandoned or at least outsourced to plastic-instrument flailing rhythm games. It somewhat touched upon a person such as me too, a collector that much appreciates showing his collection every now and then. No longer are there people sitting in my couch that I can foolishly insert into my powerfantasy of thinking they are ever so slightly impressed by the amount of space occupied by these plastic boxes.
Along came a spider, or Steam as some prefer to call it, starting as a simple service that branched out into distribution, and is probably to this date one of the most well-known and functioning digital distribution (from here refered to as DD)…thingies we have. So what’s so good about it? And why exactly does a person like -me- like it?
Steam and DD in general has both its pro’s and con’s. That a product is available everywhere via DD is swiftly limited to the fact that the concept of ‘everywhere’ equals ‘places with internet’. When you have it on a disk it’s in theory available to you at all time, but if the service that you were issued the game from should shut down, what do you do if you ever need it again?
Services like this does also neatly allow you to buy games as gifts to another person, provided they’re using the service in question. Maybe it takes away a little bit of the ‘fun’ of unwrapping presents, but well…if gifted games came wrapped it would most likely just ending up giving you viruses instead of enjoyment, in an eerie similarity to your nearest street-corner ‘lady’.
There’s also the spin on it that DD is more eco-friendly. It doesn’t require plastic boxes or to be shipped anywhere. In a crazy world where the government actually cared about gaming other than putting sometimes crude age-restrictions on games, would they think about offering tax-reliefs, help or just a pat on the back for releasing a game as DD, from the eco point of view? The whole thing can also be friendly to small companies with lower budgets, still being able to release their titles which helps in this crazy economy-tight times.
Gameshops a
re being refered to as ‘brick and mortar’ stores due to the above mentioned boxes, and some people think it will eventually go out of business. Indications are already there that it’s slowly happening. A big chunk of the recent layoffs from EA for example was apparently people handling distribution sides and contacts with major stores and so forth. Companies are already catching on to this trend, which also ties in with another ‘new’ trend called DLC (which I will talk about in the next part), and who can blame them?
Going back to the collector-part of all of this, we can once again look at Steam. They have a simple neat list of the current games (and related achievements) easy accessible to everyone. Again the holy might of the Internet has changed how we interact as gamers, even the slightly silly ones like me. Is DD ultimately a good thing? I’d like to think so. If nothing else because I live in a shoebox they’ve mistakenly labeled as apartment.
Check back next wee…uhm…time (I will try to be a bit more consistent, honest!) this is updated for part 2 of We’re going digital baby! that’ll be all about DLC.
I’m aware that I’m playing up Steam’s importance in all of this but…have you seen their holiday sales?! If you haven’t, don’t. It’s a trap.
Apologies if the formatting is wonky as fuck in this, as it’s written from a netbook. I would here attach a picture of what a wonky fuck is, but apparently it’s all Paris Hilton, so I’ll save you the pain.
