Just my 2 cents: The Digital Games Fallacy

What is wrong with digital games? Actually, first let me tell you what is right about them. I think that the concept is awesome in some cases. To the players, not having to wait until the retailers start to sell the games you want physically and not having to pay some steep import taxes in some cases to get some niche games is very handy. Also, sometimes you can double stack some discounts, getting sales on both games and credits as I just did 😀 (http://www.ebay.com/itm/261681290189?rmvSB=true and http://blog.us.playstation.com/2015/02/23/happy-birthday-ps-vita-free-items-big-sale/).

For the industry, it provides the opportunity for less known and indie developers to get some exposure, as it lowers the risks, since it lessens the cost and the risk of having to press discs and cartridges, as well as simplify logistics for publishers and retailers. But my problem is that I think that companies often abuse the system.

First of all, from the companies point of view, digital is excellent for various reasons. For starters, logistics are greatly simplified as it is easier and less risky to predict supply and demand issues with bandwidth and servers load than with discs/cartridges. Also, you cut the middleman, as there is no transportation, no retailers, no nothing: you buy, pay and get the game directly from their infrastructure, potentially (and probably) increasing profit margins.

As a bonus, it’s easier to manage and control piracy, since you have many ways of control and track numbers about players, consoles and their games. And beyond that, digital media also mitigates the used games market “problem”, as some companies often claim that it arguably causes more damage to the market than piracy (http://www.destructoid.com/lionhead-used-games-worse-than-piracy-201343.phtml).

All that being sad, I have to ask: why the heck are digital games so freaking expensive??? With the advent of digital distribution, instead of pressuring retail prices to go down, they artificially kept digital goodies prices up (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-11-13-overpricing-the-digital-future). Some may say that the companies don’t want to upset retailers by selling much cheaper since they still are a great part of their distribution. You know what? I call bull***! I don’t see any studios overcharging on Netflix to avoid angering Blockbuster. While it’s true that retailers market share may shrink a bit, people who have access to good retailers and prefer to buy physical, will buy physical nonetheless, for various reasons: collection, reselling/lending, storage/bandwidth and autonomy.

From the collection standpoint, people (like myself) like to have their boxes and manual booklets to read, show off and lend/sell them. But it’s kinda funny how the companies like to sometimes to push the worst of each world (physical and digital) on the consumer. For instance, few people seems to notice (or care) that for quite some time now, physical media doesn’t have that totally awesome instruction booklets they used to have until the 32 bits era.

Also, many games comes with day-one patches and/or season passes, where you pay more for content (sometimes already on disc/cartridge) or multiplayer “privileges”.  I won’t even comment Microsoft epic fail with its draconian DRM even for physical media on XBOne (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-06-07-microsoft-kills-game-ownership-and-expects-us-to-smile). I think all of this counterproductive, since they are trying to keep physical and retailers alive but at the same time get rid of some advantages of buying it.

The opposite is also true. While one would think that with digital media, many problems like region lock, games availability and localization issues would be at least partially solved, it’s actually a (bad) joke. Foreign PSN, for instance, sometimes offers a thin selection of games compared to US PSN, sometimes more than 50% more expensive (https://wololo.net/2013/12/04/vita-and-ps4-games-50-more-expensive-in-europe-or-why-and-how-i-moved-to-a-us-psn-account/) on games that aren’t even localized.

So, if the games aren’t even localized, what is the service actually being provided to justify such high prices? My guess is none, the only reason I can think for their existence is to collect taxes and to avoid copyright differences between countries. But none of this actually benefits the players and that is why many non-american players use US accounts or worse, they turn back to piracy. About the region lock, there is this funny video snippet that express my feelings about it:

On the bandwidth issue, not every country is like Japan that have ultra high burning internet speed of doom all across the country, as well as domestic CDNs to deliver content at ridiculously high speeds. Another fact that often gets overlooked is that it is RIDICULOUSLY EXPENSIVE for the developer to deploy a patch on a console game (http://kotaku.com/5884842/wait-it-costs-40000-to-patch-a-console-game) . I mean, seriously? A developer is trying to improve the players experience and have to suffer for it? There are various gems that don’t get published on consoles because of that. I won’t even bother to talk about storage, since we PSVITA owners all know how infamously overpriced the storage can be.

But my biggest complain is about autonomy. It may not look like it, but mainstream digital distribution for gaming is kind of in its infancy. If we look closely, it was not until the last generation of consoles (PS3, X360, PSP and Wii) that it was so heavily used. All is kinda good now, but what happens when all of these past, current and future consoles are dead and buried? Do we lose the games we unfairly paid full retail price? Remember PSP GO?

What about the people that bought the PSP (and specially PSP GO: https://wololo.net/2014/09/09/psp-will-lose-ability-to-access-the-psn-store-next-week/ ) ? Is it fair for the users to have to buy a PSVITA just to play their PSP games they bought on the PSP? In Nintendo’s case it is even more stupid, as the games are tied with the hardware rather than an account (http://kotaku.com/5982965/nintendo-fan-is-unhappy-with-nintendos-200-answer-to-his-400-wii-u-problem). It makes you wonder if piracy is all that unethical, since sometimes it’s the only way to enjoy the games you legally bought.

The only company that seems to be doing digital right is Valve, with Steam. Not only they charge reasonable prices (even when it’s not on sale), but they manage to do the heavy lifting on a very diverse environment, installing dependencies, distributing player generated content, activating and etc. Also, after they deployed Big Picture, you can have an experience that mirrors video game consoles very closely. And on top of that, they are promoting migration to open source alternatives so I can finally get rid of Windows forever in my life, which to me is a big plus. And more recently Valve seems to be on a crusade to empower developers and players rather than publishers. For instance, now developers can set their own sales (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/02/27/developer-discounts-steam-sales-are-changing/).

I guess that what I’m trying to say here is that most companies are not realizing the digital nor the physical distribution methods to their full potential, artificially getting the worst of both worlds to protect only their interests, without giving a second thought about the consumers and their convenience. So companies please, step your game up!!