The modern society is build on a lots of thing. If we look back to the 80’s and guess what they thought earth would look like 2010. We though we would have invented the flying vehicle, robot assistances, weird space-looking clothes. (Yeah I’m kinda referring to the “Back to the future” movies xD). During the 70’s, right after we landed on the moon they probably though we would’ve colonized it and walked upon the surface of Mars by now.
One thing we did not predicted was the Internet. A digital network all over the world where you can do pretty much everything. Since I’m so young, internet is a part of my whole childhood so I don’t have a complete picture of it’s development but I do know that the progress of the internet and technology surrounding modern electronics. And it’s bad ass, 10 years ago we were surfing on 56k modem connection today there’s huge differences.
Anyway this Editorial isn’t about the development of the internet nor the nano technology. But it was a nice start. Digital Distribution is a service on the internet where you can purchase stuff and get it immediately, mostly. This is common for purchasing movies, music and most of all games online. When It comes to games, there’s usually also a community to connect players easier.
The most common digital distributions are Xbox Live Marketplace, Playstation Store and Wii Shop. These are of course the only digital distributions for their console, which makes sense. When it comes to PC, there’s a battle between digital distributions since no company owns this platform, but the biggest is Steam Store, Games for Windows Live and Battle.net (mostly because the got World of Warcraft).
The main battle is between Steam Store and GFWL since Battle.net contains of only Blizzard’s titles and they are not available anywhere else. There’s also smaller DD’s like D2D and GoG. So what are the pros and cons with purchasing games over the internet the digital way? pros: it’s usually cheaper than buying retailed in store and even retailed online (when you receive the game a couple of days later in a package). It goes fast, you got the game after the transaction. You will have your games at gathered on one spot wherever you log in from. cons: you don’t have a physical form of the game. You are not certain that you really own the game.
So what do I think of Digital Distribution, well I got different arguments. Having a retail game is wonderful, the smell of the manual and, if you purchased a special/gold/complete/collector’s edition, a lot of other goodies. It’s always nice looking on them, feel the package xD (I might have a fetish for game boxes)… Why do I then prefer DD? I am heavily interested in Steam compared to GFWL. This is mainly because i don’t have a xbox, I’m only PC. The steam community is much more open and simplified than xbox live. I can see the advantage of using GFWL and Xbox Live if I had a xbox. And look at the prices, Steam got at least one sale per day, from 10% to 85%. I’ve spend a maximum of 300USD on games for my steam account, while according to this calculation I’ve spend 900USD (and that site somehow says I got 71 games when I got 85 =S). Which means I’ve only purchased games when they are at least 66% off =P. There’s also some titles that are activatable on steam through the retailed CD-key.
One thing that really annoys me is that Valve (owner of steam) and Microsoft (owner of GFWL/Xlive) are so competitive that they wont allow their published games to be sold on each others DD’s… I want Age of empires and Halo to Steam, and I think many want Team Fortress 2, Half-Life 2 and Left 4 Dead on GFWL.
Feel free to start discussions if you’ve read through the whole article xD
Discussion Topic: Digital Distribution and the Facts!
