Peter Crisp wrote:Shadow wrote:Who is it not viable for? Have you got any figures? You're saying millions, but I doubt that.
Plenty of countries don't have an Internet infrastructure as good as the UK. I think we are blinded by just how good we have it here and just assume everyone must be as well. MCNs point about not living near an exchange is valid as it affects a fair amount of people (me included as my exchange can't even get free sky BB due to it not being upgraded).
Download only may indeed be what Microsoft/Sony want but they can't force people to do anything.
How many people in countries without broadband provision are likely to buy a next gen console? Sony at least, will be launching with a Blu-Ray drive, Microsoft more than likely will do too, even if it's only really for backwards compatibility. If they do stop selling disk games in the larger territories that doesn't mean they can't sell disk versions in smaller territories who can't feasibly use BB.
And of course my vending machine idea that I've now mentioned three times, which has been ignored every single time, is a perfectly viable solution.
The only people that are going to be upset by this are the core gamers (myself included) I've got thousands of games, all in near mint condition, all proudly on display or carefully boxed up so I can pull them out in years to come, I will buy boxed games for as long as I possibly can no matter what premium I have to pay.
The fact of the matter is - and it is a fact - the games industry is losing far too much money to the retailers, especially through pre-owned. 25% of what Game sell is pre-owned, about 40-50% at GS and 100% at CEX, that is absolutely HUGE amounts of money that the people making the games aren't getting a look at, you can argue all you want that people would buy less games if they couldn't trade in, but you can't argue that the games manufacturers are massively losing out.
You will not find a single person at any publisher who doesn't despise the retailer, despite all of the work they do together, with the publisher chucking money at GAME to push their game and stick up posters, the shop is still stood there pushing a pre-owned copy of the game as being "Just as good as new". No-one would say it, but I'm convinced the advent of digital distribution is intended as a big "strawberry float YOU" to the games retailers that have been screwing over the industry for the last two decades.
Sony are already selling games as download only in case you hadn't noticed, Wipeout would normally be a huge release, but they're selling it as download only, if this doesn't prove to you they don't give a strawberry float about people with gooseberry fool internet then nothing will.