Where Are Games Going Next? Digital Distribution?

Personally I think it will hurt the industry to move to digital downloads. While having small games, such as retro arcade games, etc., the infrastructure isn’t in place to handle 5-30GB of data constantly. DSL struggles to run console games now, and I would assume if people are going to be downloading games that may take up to 8+ hours to download, they are going to want to play during the download. Until the communications speed and bandwidth is increased to a point where I can simultaneously: play online, have a friend over playing online with the same connection, while someone else surf’s the internet and I can download a game in the background with little to no deterioration of my connection, I think it would be a bad move for the industry.

This also doesn’t mention the possibility of identity theft. I feel much more secure shopping in a brick and mortar location than online. Parents can more easily talk to a sales person about a game when shopping in person as opposed to online. There’s a danger both to credit card fraud as well as allowing inappropriate material into the home that need to be dealt with before digital distribution can become popular.

Digital distribution is already pretty popular. Looks at Direct2Drive and others. Heck, just recently I downloaded a copy of Age of Conan just so I could play before the CD arrived at my house.

I still like the idea of the brick and mortal location, but realistically digital download is much cheaper in terms of publishing a game. Of course, most game companies don’t pass on savings, they just pocket more.

Bandwidth is available in some areas to do what you are asking Tater, not everywhere though. You could of course limit your download bandwidth so you can do other things, but then the download will just take longer. The more bandwidth available the quicker the download – but I know what you mean. If you have more download capacity than the distributor is willing to let you use, then ya you’ll have some to spare.

I currently have a DSL connection at home. While playing Call of Duty 4 on the 360, I can notice a significant amount of delay between when I start firing and when the host detects that I’m firing. I struggle playing with the ammount of delay I’m talking about. I’m planning on switching back to cable to fix the problem. Being online and talking to friends on “AIM” or having another computer in the house on the internet at the same time increases the problem.

I don’t know how large a file Age of Conan was, but I can’t imagine trying to download MGS4 or Resistance 2 which from what I’ve heard are both 30+GB. That would take my connection a day or longer, and I don’t know how anyone else is other than me, but I can believe that people are going to want to play their game the minute they decide to purchase it.

Heh, you are right there. AoC took me the better part of a week to download, largely in part to slow download speed from Funcom but even at the fastest it would have taken the better part of a day.

You may be able to upgrade your DSL connection, most providers offer more than one version. I have DSL myself and can comfortably run CoD4 (PC version), Teamspeak and have my wife on her laptop browsing the internet or downloading email without any real issues. If she starts downloading music or something I’d have a problem lol, but yes cable has much more bandwidth available. Comcast here will soon be offering 2gb UP and 50gb DOWN! Blazing fast.

I need to move there. We have the fastest available DSL from AT&T at the moment. I’m very dissapointed with it and it’s costing within $10 of what cable in my area would cost. I want to say my DSL is 256MB up and 718MB down or that is the step above what we have thats not available to us.

Ouch. Ya that’s slow. I think mine is 512up 6mb down.