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Feature: Top 5 Reasons Digital Distribution Sucks

Digital distribution is a hot topic these days. All forms of digital media are starting to make a move toward being distributed solely online with no physical retail presence. This generation of consoles has ushered in a new wave in digital distribution in games, and the PC market’s been doing it for even longer. Up until this year’s E3, most digitally distributed gaming content came in two flavors: downloadable content such as maps, weapons etc., or bite-sized “arcade” titles that are sold on the Xbox Live Marketplace, Playstation Network, and WiiWare. That’s all changing now that Microsoft has introduced their new games on demand service. We are beginning to see the shift away from the physical retail space to the digital online marketplace, and this can only mean bad news for video game consumers. Here are 5 reasons that irrefutably prove that digital distribution is not a good thing.

5. No Physical Copies

I’m assuming that if you’re reading this, you have a pretty sizable video game collection. You probably have them all ordered nicely in some order which is most convenient to you; all of your games nice and neat, sitting in a row on a shelf somewhere. Well, just imagine if somebody started taking those games away one by one until you had none left.

That analogy obviously isn’t perfect. With digital distribution you will still be able to play your games, you just won’t own any tangible, physical product that you can show off to all of your friends. The amount of games you own in your massive collection that stretches all the way back to the Atari 2600 is now relegated to a number on a server somewhere.

Not only are your game discs/cartridges gone, but so is all of that beautiful cover art and the delightfully useless manuals, because there’s no need to package a product which is distributed through digital channels.

Some people may be able to live without any sort of physical indication that they own a game, in fact, some people will probably prefer it for the space saving convenience that it provides, but there are plenty of people, myself included, that find the whole idea a bit unnerving. Plus, you don’t get to experience that new game smell anymore.

4. Digital Games Do Not Cost Less Than Their Physical Counterparts

Now, you might be thinking “I can live without physical products as long as it’s going to save me some money,” but, the truth is, it’s not. It might make sense that, since publishers don’t have to package the products or make any discs, you would see some savings because of this. But that’s clearly not the case. Perusing the Steam catalog, I notice a distinct lack of actual discounts. Sure, Steam has deals almost every week, but those aren’t permanent and they don’t usually apply to new releases. The majority of games which have just been released or are available for pre-order cost just as much as if you bought the game at a retail outlet.

And guess what? It’s not just the packaging which companies no longer have to pay for. Read this quote about how consumers have to provide their own bandwidth and physical media from MediaLoper to see just how much we’re getting screwed:

If you burn your music to a CD, you provide the blank disks. When you download a movie, you supply the bandwidth. Media and bandwidth are roughly equivalent to what the entertainment industry calls “manufacturing and distribution”. Those are costs that used to be fronted by media companies and built into the price of their products. In the era of digital downloads consumers are now bearing the costs of manufacturing and distribution. Meanwhile media companies are still including those costs in the price of their digital products. You could argue that Apple and Amazon are providing bandwidth as well – and while that’s certainly true, the media companies are still benefiting from the fact that someone else is paying for the transfer of bits.

That’s just dandy.

3. No Internet Connection? No games!

So say the end of the world is upon us and you suddenly lose power. There’s no electricity to run your console on, so, like any good gamer, you whip out your shiny new handheld to play some games before the Rapture. Well, you can’t ride out the end of the world on your handheld because you have no internet connection. So that PSP Go!, or DSiWare game that you wanted to play will have to wait.

Digital distribution is dependent in the utmost on an internet connection. If you lose that connection for whatever reason, your console will not be able to authenticate your purchase with the server and you will be unable to play your game. In addition, without an internet connection you most certainly won’t be able to purchase any new games either.

2. Hope You’ve Got Time to Wait for that Download

It’s release day for Grand Theft Auto 8 and you’re pumped to start playing as soon as possible, so you sign in to your digital distribution console to go purchase the next highly anticipated entry in the GTA series, the system takes your money and your download starts, the game is at your fingertips, you’ll be playing in… 3 hours? That’s the current average for Xbox Original titles downloaded through the Xbox 360 Dashboard. And those are last-gen, non-HD games. Point is, waits are going to be long.

Not only do you have to worry about the file size and the speed of your internet connection, but you have to take into account the amount of people downloading the title at the same time as you. The more people downloading, the more stress that puts on the server, and the longer it takes for you to download your game. Just imagine the millions of people that want to download that new GTA on launch day and the amount of problems that would spring up because of the massive amount. It would just be a mess filled with horror stories of not only ridiculously long download times, but people not being able to buy the game at all or buying and downloading but then not being able to play because the servers went down.

1. The Technology Just Isn’t There Yet

You may have noticed a theme with the last two entries in this list: technological problems abound with digital distribution. In addition to the two problems previously listed, networking technology has not reached the point where wide-scale digital distribution is possible.

Foremost, internet penetration is not very high throughout the world. The world average internet penetration is a measly 23.8%, and only 47 countries have an internet penetration higher than 50%, with the United States coming in at number 13 with 72.3% (Source).

And that’s internet penetration in general, it still includes those poor saps stuck with dial-up. Digital distribution will require high-speed internet access, and the broadband penetration in the U.S. currently sits at 60%, or 20th in the world (Source).

As impressive as those figures may seem to you, they are not enough for wide scale digital distribution to be feasible. The internet backbone in the United States (and the rest of the world), including download speeds as well as penetration, needs to catch up before digital distribution becomes a convenient reality.

Author: Ryan