Game Dev: The Sooner We Go Digital, The Better

Most of the "impulse" games I've bought recently were Steam deals marked down to $5 or less ($7.50 for Borderlands). I'm not going to bitch about not being able to resell a game when I only paid $5 for it.
 
Shotglass01 said:
It's going that way, no doubt. Though I did not like this one damn bit:

After reading that I thought he could go fuck himself. Not for retail going out of business, but that whole used copy bullshit.
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randomhero58 said:
Yeah, I've never understood the whole game devs/pubs vs used game business.

I mean I don't really see book publishers complain about Half Price Books or libraries or car makers complaining about used car dealers, etc (or hell, any manufacturer of anything complaining about ebay/craigslist). Although maybe some do, but I just don't see it as often as game dev/publishers complain about it.
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Agreed with him 100% up until this crap. Seriously, how do these morons not see that this is NO different than books, or any other USED product?
 
The sooner they go all digital the sooner game developers lose me as a customer. High speed internet is not available to everyone contrary to what people may think.
 
It's called steam.... i mean seriously, is there any disadvantage to Steam, besides the necessity of the internet connection?

You can re download as many times as you want, patches are seamless, online play is practically cheat free, no bandwidth limitations, makes it really easy to reinstall all your games on a new pc....

In all honesty, am I missing something? Are there any practical arguments against it? And by practical, I mean, no "I don't want the 'man' knowing what games I play" arguments...
 
He should be talking to the dbag ISPs and not the already converted. HTF can I go fully digital when said dbag ISPs in Canada want to cap us at 25GB per month?
 
LOST CAUSE! Until EA and every game developer along with internet model business persuay the telecoms and cable industry to uncap, their mission is destined for failure.
 
TooEasy! said:
LOST CAUSE! Until EA and every game developer along with internet model business persuay the telecoms and cable industry to uncap, their mission is destined for failure.
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Yeah, fresh install of WoW is something like 25GBs.
 
iansilv said:
It's called steam.... i mean seriously, is there any disadvantage to Steam, besides the necessity of the internet connection?

You can re download as many times as you want, patches are seamless, online play is practically cheat free, no bandwidth limitations, makes it really easy to reinstall all your games on a new pc....

In all honesty, am I missing something? Are there any practical arguments against it? And by practical, I mean, no "I don't want the 'man' knowing what games I play" arguments...
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Yes. You're depending on someone else's servers to let you use your property.

Servers down...? Valve bankrupt...? Valve bans or cancels your account...? You're screwed out of your "purchased" game.

That's a rental in my book. Not ownership.
 
Yet again PC is ahead of the game.

Consoles will never go Digital for atleast 2 gens due to "Piracy" and after this PSN thing I don't trust M$ or Sony to run a Digital anything at this point.
 
Ualdayan said:
I can count on a retailer to mark a game down as it ages, and if a game is really old you can usually find it at a really enticing price if it's still in the store. Digital downloads, however, have no incentive to move inventory.
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That was the case, once upon a time. Until Valve put L4D on sale for half price, and to their surprise, they not only sold more units but made more money than they did at launch. So now we have 50-90%-off sales every week, if not every day.

Hell, I saw Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising for AU$70 at EB the other day, and I think I paid $3.75 on Steam...


iansilv said:
It's called steam.... i mean seriously, is there any disadvantage to Steam, besides the necessity of the internet connection?
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1) Patches are forced on you. If v1.2 is fine and v1.3 is busted, you're shit outta luck.

2) Mods are less likely to work; I've seen many which are incompatible with Steam versions. Especially anything tied to a specific version of the .exe, like a trainer. This also ties in with (1), if a mod relies on a certain game version.

3) It doesn't always work. More times than I can count, Steam has decided that an offline single player game, fully patched, is "currently unavailable". And sometimes Steam just won't log me in.

4) They're doing well now, but they're not going to be around forever. They say (or so I've heard) that if the service ever shuts down, they'll remove the DRM from all the games. But I really doubt that's going to happen. It's a mammoth task given the size of their catalogue nowadays, and if the company's going under, they won't be able to afford it. Plus I doubt they have the technical or legal ability to strip the copy protection from most of the games on there. Activision is sure as hell not going to agree to distributing cracked multiplayer-capable copies of the latest CoD.
 
Kuraudo said:
Bandwidth caps in the US surely are only possible if the people hitting them are pirates, but with HD netflix, hulu, and soon consoles all streaming their content, there's no way politicians won't leap on this as crusade opportunity for easy re-election "see what I did for this nation's poor and downtrodden?"
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If games went digital only I and I had a bandwidth cap I would hit that cap a lot of times , because I dont have a credit card so I dont have any way of buying games digitally so I would have no other way of aquiring the games but to pirate them. These developers should think about people like me who cant buy digitally too.
 
iansilv said:
It's called steam.... i mean seriously, is there any disadvantage to Steam, besides the necessity of the internet connection?

You can re download as many times as you want, patches are seamless, online play is practically cheat free, no bandwidth limitations, makes it really easy to reinstall all your games on a new pc....

In all honesty, am I missing something? Are there any practical arguments against it? And by practical, I mean, no "I don't want the 'man' knowing what games I play" arguments...
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Yes not everybody have access to credit / debit cards so not everybody has the ability to buy digital games. Also not everybody has access to high speed internet. Just because you can buy digitally and have high speed internet doesnt mean everybody who owns a computer is the same as you.
 
If we go all digital then I want something bigger then the 60GB bandwith cap that I get here in Canada.
 
iansilv said:
It's called steam.... i mean seriously, is there any disadvantage to Steam, besides the necessity of the internet connection?

You can re download as many times as you want, patches are seamless, online play is practically cheat free, no bandwidth limitations, makes it really easy to reinstall all your games on a new pc....

In all honesty, am I missing something? Are there any practical arguments against it? And by practical, I mean, no "I don't want the 'man' knowing what games I play" arguments...
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Yea, Steam requires a client to play the games and GamersGate, D2D, and Impulse don't.
 
LuminaryJanitor said:
4) They're doing well now, but they're not going to be around forever. They say (or so I've heard) that if the service ever shuts down, they'll remove the DRM from all the games. But I really doubt that's going to happen. It's a mammoth task given the size of their catalogue nowadays, and if the company's going under, they won't be able to afford it. Plus I doubt they have the technical or legal ability to strip the copy protection from most of the games on there. Activision is sure as hell not going to agree to distributing cracked multiplayer-capable copies of the latest CoD.
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If that was ever to happen heads will roll. Gamers can be a very hostile bunch if needed.
 
Gnasher said:
If that was ever to happen heads will roll. Gamers can be a very hostile bunch if needed.
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They'll be pissed, sure, but what are they going to do? If the company's folded, no amount of hate mail, angry forum rants and worthless online petitions is going to finance the de-Steamification of the entire Steam catalogue.
 
I see this being fine with PC games as most you can't resell anyways once you use the key. I love Steam and D2D. I buy alot of my pc games that way. As for Console games, I agree it makes it harder to resale or trade. I buy alot of my console games used.
 
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