It’s no secret that the gaming industry is heading towards an all digital market. PC games are already there. Outside of purchasing a physical collector’s edition, I can’t remember the last time I actually went to the store to pick up a PC title. Steam just makes purchasing and playing a game so effortless that I have no need to own physical copies of most of my games. Consoles have tried to transform to digital, but up to this point it has not been graceful. For every step forward, they seem to fall on their ass and get nowhere. Now, I’m no industry expert, but I have a feeling that it would only take a few simple implementations in order for console gamers to openly embrace the idea of more digital media.
Cheaper Games
This one is the most obvious, but it bears repeating. Publishers can’t expect gamers to continue to fork over $60 for a purely digital title. The whole reason that console gaming became so popular was on account that at any time we could trade, borrow or sell our games. It allowed everyone to better budget their entertainment money because there were other options besides dropping $60 on a brand new game. We aren’t stupid. We know that offering a game digitally cuts out all distribution costs. Why is it so hard to pass those savings onto the customer? Luckily Sony is pioneering that with the Vita by offering a 10% discount for their digital offerings. It’s a good start, but considering the high price of the memory sticks, it is far from ideal right now.
Crazy Sales
You have no idea how impulsive I become during the Steam summer or winter sales. Well actually maybe you do. It appears that most people have little self control when Valve decides to discount games to upwards of 75% off. Once a game is below $10, it’s difficult to justify not purchasing it. Even though I’ll probably never play through the majority of the games that I purchased during the sale, I still got them because they were just that cheap. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you consider your wallet) no one else has realized that gamers are impulse buyers. Provide a product for cheap enough, even for a brief period, and sales will skyrocket.
Automatic Updates
Updates have got to be one of the most frustrating parts of gaming. I have yet to run into a game that has not had some sort of patch that didn’t make the cut for the certification process or just some tweaking to a game that has been out for a while. What annoys me the most is having to sit through an update just to play the game. Sony managed to get half way there by including automatic updates for PS+ users, but that still isn’t the ideal process. Those updates only occur during the allotted time you set your PS3 to turn on and retrieve any available updates. This becomes a problem because developers don’t have a standard time of day that they need to push patches. They go live when they are ready. Also, the automatic update only happens every other day, which means if you decide to play on an off day, you still may have to sit through an update process even if you are a PS+ member. While the 360 has no feature, their updates have always been small in comparison. That doesn’t mean I have to like it, though. Once again, Steam does it perfectly. The moment I launch it (which happens as soon as I boot up my PC), any game that needs an update will automatically start the process unless I specifically tell the game not to. If people don’t want complete patching control lost to them, a pop up saying “these games have updates, would you like me to begin downloading them?” would allow someone to control what gets patched. It just bothers me in an age where my systems are almost always online, I still have to manually sit through and wait for a patch to be downloaded and installed.
Updates Included in Game Download
Not having this feature right now just boggles my mind. If a game has been out for a few months, I expect that any and all patches included up to that point would be part of the initial download. So far it seems that no one has thought of that yet. This links back to the previous point of having to sit through an update to get it done. If all the updates where included with the original game download, then I would not have to sit through yet another process to wait to play my game. If I download a game, I should expect it to work the minute it is done installing.
Now that I look back on my points, all I want is Steam for my consoles. Valve is so far ahead of its competition in the digital market, that I’m surprised that everyone else is still alive at this point. Their awesome sales coupled with the ease of downloading and updating games makes it the ideal application to distribute games. Here’s hoping that everyone else is smart enough to figure out that Valve has it pretty much down packed right now. The sooner that happens, the sooner we as gamers can embrace the digital market.
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That might actually convince me to buy a console, but for now, I’m happy playing dozens of games on my computer. On steam.
Regarding Cheap Games, it’s absolutely a benefit to the dev and publisher to do this. It’s a proven trend that when a game gets a nutty Steam sale, the sales (obviously) spike during the sale but continue to see residual effects of the spike after the sale ends, when the game is at full price. Then you have a bunch of brand new people playing your game. Win-win-win.