Digital Distribution – A Counter Argument

Everyone praises Steam and its ilk nowadays, digital distribution is the big hot topic amongst developers, publishers and anyone else associated with gaming. Almost everyone is praising digital distribution as if it were the second coming. The voices of discontent are minimal, but there are issues to be considered. Digital distribution, is it really all that great?

The Steam group, Rest of World (missing a ‘the’ in there I think) has been a voice of criticism against many of the issues with Steam which is one of, it not –the- leading method of digital distribution on the PC. The group which is over five thousand members strong is campaigning for developers and publishers to provide a fair and equal service to all Steam users regardless of nationality.

Steam suffers massively from issues of pricing and availability of games in different parts of the world. Games such as Call of Duty 4 have cost $40 more to buy in Australia than in the US via Steam. (cnet.au) Many other games that are readily available in the US are not available in Australia or other parts of the world.

Ubisoft the mega-developer and publisher from France has a large range of games available on Steam. These games are only available to those Steam users from the US. While the people who set the prices of games on Steam (not Valve) may have reasons for these examples of poor and equal availability these are not shared with the people who matter, the gamers.

When Rock, Paper, Shotgun enquired about these issues representatives of Ubisoft and Atari provided variances on the classic ‘No Comment’ line.

This isn’t an issue exclusive to Steam, a visit to both the US and UK Direct2Drive sites reveal some startling differences. The US sites has five pages of PC games for sale, the UK site has only two. Looking at specific games to purchase Bioshock from the UK Direct2Drive site costs around £5 more than it would from the US site after taking into account currency rates.

With Bioshock costing £2 less on Play.com that the UK Direct2Drive site with free postage, the question must be asked, is digital distribution worth it, especially for those of us outside of the US. If it is cheaper to purchase a game from retail, or if there is no option of a digitally distributed copy then surely the whole system must be reworked in order to remove this issue.

The question also arises about micro-transactions. With games moving ever more consistently online surely the rise of digital distribution has played a role in the rise of micro-transactions in games. Battlefield Heroes will use micro-transactions as the key part in its revenue making process and even Valve are thinking about getting in on the act (IGN Interview)
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The rise of digital distribution is surely a key factor in the rise of micro-transactions, with the idea of paying for a digital product put into peoples minds then it surely makes people more susceptible to micro-transactions.

The days of unlocking new clothes and suchlike has gone, now if you want anything extra to what you buy originally it seems that you have to use micro-transactions to give yourself more choice. This is a sign of the games industry changing, and changing for the worse.

Digital distribution also raises the issue downloading all those gigabytes of data. While broadband speeds may be getting ever faster for some, games are becoming ever larger themselves. With Call of Duty 4 and Assassin’s Creed clocking in at 8Gb they will take a fair bit of downloading even on faster connections. The latest Steam Hardware Survey reveals that over 30% of respondents are on an internet connection less than 1Mb/sec.

Downloading games such as Call of Duty 4 will take quite a while, a long, long while in fact for those 30% of Steam users. This presents a clear impracticality of digital distribution, if you want to play a game immediately after playing then you will need a retail copy. Digital distribution is taking away the immediacy that should be present in gaming.

Other issues arise when it comes to playing games downloaded via digital distribution sources. Some require connection to a program separate to the game itself, take Steam as an example. Now while often you will be able to play these games fine there are numerous instances when problems arise. These problems are often that the program like Steam recognises that the game needs to be updated to play.

This is a common problem when people attempt to play games from Steam without an internet connection as they will find Steam prevents them from playing with the game not up to date. This sometimes constant need to be connected to the internet to play a singleplayer game is another major downfall of digital distribution. If the game had been bought from retail and used a CD/DVD then this issue would likely not have arisen.

We can therefore see that there are many issues surrounding digital distribution right now, some are pretty small issues, while others are much more pressing and need to be addressed. If these issues are not looked at then digital distribution will stall and fail to evolve and grow.

Tags: Call of Duty 4, digital distribution, Online, Pricing, Steam

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 8:35 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.