I’ve been digital only for five or six years now. I buy from Steam, GoG, Bigfish, Gamer’s Gate and Amazon. Oh, and Blizzard (Twelve More Hours!!!) I also buy other software, for example, I recently bought Dreamweaver and Power Archiver, from Adobe & Conexware. You’ve probably never heard of Conexware, but they’ve been around for 11 years and they make great archiving software.
For all the concerns about it - it’s just never been a problem.
Justin_Bailey - I’m pretty sure the console side is also going Download Only, too. Slower, maybe, since they don’t have the big indie scene that the PC side does. But all the next gen consoles are going to have download options for their software. It’s only a matter of time before they start goign download only, too. Microsoft, Nintendo & Sony would be just as happy to cut out Gamestop & Best Buy as Valve & Blizzard are.
Most of the download sites only allow a very small number of downloads. If I get a particularly nasty virus, it might take more than one or two tries to get that sucker off my computer…and I might not notice a problem for a week or so.
Second, I was under the impression that most of these games can’t be backed up, because of copyright issues and DRM issues. I’m not really technically savvy, so maybe there IS a way to back up copyrighted material despite anti-piracy measures.
I still prefer physical media. Of course, I long for the good old days of Infocom’s feelies, too.
Someday, I’m sure it will. But the state of bandwidth availability in the US in 2012 (or 2017 or 2022) means that we’re still very far away from that future. Games are getting bigger and bigger and there’s no way that 5 million copies of the next Call of Duty will be able to be downloaded in one day without grinding the entire Internet to a halt.
If you really believe gaming will always remain a mostly brick and mortar, you pay for a single game that you own, affair you are seriously out of touch with reality.
Gaming as a service, increasingly digital, and eventually living in the cloud is the future.
We can debate as to WHEN that future will hit, but it WILL happen.
10-15 years from now little Timmy won’t be loading up a game on his xbox 8. He’ll just hit the controller pad and his smart TV will load up Steam/Xbox Live/PSN store front and away he’ll go.
On the way to school little Timmy will load up the same game on his phone and continue gaming there.
Even the old hard core gamers with dedicated gaming hardware (PC gamers only probably) will either be on the cloud, or have pure digital gaming libraries. There might even be monthly subscription type services where you pay a certain amount per month and you can play any game you want from their digital library.
The next gen of consoles will heavily promote digital downloads simply because the profit margins are so much better. PC digital distribution is making a killing - game publishers get back 70% of the amount of the sale compared to retail which can be more like 25%. And the flexibility of digital distribution to run sales that extract the maximum amount of money at all possible price points has been wildly successful. There’s no way Sony/MS/etc doesn’t try to cash in on that action.
The next gen of consoles will have much better support for digital distribution and maybe they can get their heads out of their ass too and realize what pricing model works best to really get people to switch. Plus it could eliminate the problem of used sales in a way that’s less obnoxious than simply banning them - keep people happy with cheap game prices and they won’t care that they can’t go to gamestop and sell their games for 1/10th the original purchase price. I’ve got 500 games on steam, and I don’t care in the slightest that I can’t sell any of them - because I probably paid as much as it would’ve cost me to get 20 console games. I’d rather have the extra 480 games than the option to get a few bucks from gamestop.
Many PS3 games run in the range of 20-30 GB of information. Do you really believe our current Internet capabilities can handle that kind of capacity on top of a growing desire for streaming video and a growing desire for Internet companies to implement bandwidth caps.
Cloud services like Gaikai or OnLive work as well as they do (and I’ve yet to read a report that states they’re a comparable replacement for a disc-based/full download game) is because so few people are using them right now.
You agree that it WILL happen, just that it cannot happen NOW. That’s true. I don’t think the infrastructure is there yet. But it WILL be, sooner rather than later.
Saying this won’t happen is like saying that we will always be buying music CD’s back in 2003.
Huh? What download sites are you using? All the places I get digital games allow me to download it as many times as I bloody well please. You’re actually FAR more likely to be screwed over by DISC media here, nowadays, because games are starting to ship with “NO NO! Only 5 installs for you unless you talk to technical support, you dirty pirate you!” DRM schemes.
The most DRM most sites use (Excepting the ghastly Games for Windows Live) only extends as far as “the game uses your username/password to check back in with the mothership to verify that it’s really you”. Nothing keeps you from copying the software. Heck, a lot of sites (GamersGate, GOG, etc) have no DRM at all.
A moment of silence for good physical items please.
Steam, Blizzard, Bigfish, GoG, Amazon allow as many downloads as you need. Oh, and Popcap. They’re good.
The EA store / Origin varies wildly by product (partly because it’s going through a major transition, partly because EA are major shitheads.) They have mostly implemented unlimited downloads.
Impulse is now owned by GameSpot. I haven’t bought anything from them in ages but I think they support redownloadability, too.
Direct2Drive was recently bought by GameFly. I would stay away from them because they are have a very ugly transition.
Bottomline: unlimited downloads are the current standard operating procedure. Companies like having you redownload things, because that’s a chance for them to sell you something new.
It varies - but that’s more a reflection on the state of DRM than the state of downloadable software.
Downloadable setup files are easy to backup. Companies rarely DRM the actual setup files. Instead, they let you copy it and then, after you’ve installed it, ask for an activation code. That way, if you don’t have a code, they can offer to sell you one.
Gog, for example, has no DRM on any of its software. ISTR that Gamer’s Gate doesn’t either.
Steam, Blizzard and BigFish lets you copy the installation directory anywhere you want for backup purposes (usually). So, for example, when you download from Steam, it handles the whole installation thing (Steam is, functionally, an app store). I installed Steam on my D:\ drive. Steam installs everything at D:\Steam\steamapps\common. When I bought Skyrim, it but that at D:\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim. The Skyrim folder in its entirety can be backed up to a whole other drive or zipped and burned to a disk. Then if you need to reinstall the game, just copy the folder back to the Steam directory.
The upshot of this is that, by installing my Steam games on the D:\ drive, when I reinstall my OS on the C:\ drive, I never need to reinstall the games. They work immediately.
The caveat is, some games, especially from EA & UBISoft are notorious for for having killer DRM issues, such as allowing limited installs of their software. Even if you buy Anno 2070 on the disk - you can only install it a few times before the limit kicks in. This affects both the hardcopy and the downloadable version.
But all that’s really a DRM issue, not so much a digital/hardcopy issue. The whole DRM issue is really the molasses swamp of software sales. Nobody’s safe. The good news is that companies are mostly moving to less intrusive DRM schemes. The evidence is in and it’s pretty much just an enormous waste of money.
So to answer your question, for backup purposes, it’s mostly not an issue to either reinstall a downloaded game or save the setup file.
Sure. I still I have the Scratch & Sniff card from Leather Goddesses of Phobos. But things like that are vanishingly rare, these days. Even manuals mostly come as .pdfs on the disks.
Anthropologists of the Future will gnash their teeth at the switch to digital software - but their not the ones who have to find closet space for all this stuff, either.
I was going to buy something direct from THQ’s website once and they wanted to charge me an extra couple of bucks if I wanted to be able to download it again later. It was like some “protection plan”. I didn’t buy it based on principle since no other game download site I deal with has anything like that (Steam, GOG, Amazon, Green Man Gaming, GetGames, GamersGate, etc).
I’ve no fear of Steam going away any time soon. Even if they decided to pull the plug tomorrow, they’d be bought up by Amazon or Google or someone like a shot.
Steam. That’s really the only way I like to buy games these days. I made a concession wrt Diablo III, but generally I buy everything with Steam now (I have even re-purchased games from companies like Stardock on Steam just for the convenience of the service).
I’m not worried in the least that Steam is going to go away and I’ll be stuck without some game 20 years from now because I can’t see Steam going belly up and no one taking on the user base…and, frankly, I don’t see a large possibility of Steam going out of business in any case unless they monumentally screw up in the future. I just wish every game I love was part of the Steam Workshop (I’d love it if my Total War games and Sins of a Solar Empire, for instance, were part of Steam Workshop).
I don’t see the reason behind the obsession with physical media anymore. I mean, do people think there will be a zombie apocalypse or nuclear war and they will be stuck in a bunker, unable to re-download their games and pining away in a Free Cell or Solitaire end of the world wasteland (drinking radiated water and having to shoot biker chicks in real life :p)??
Not as drastic as that, but I’m not so secure as to believe that my internet connection will always be available. And someone else upthread mentioned that some single player games need to be connected to the servers to play, and that is ridiculous (especially if I want to play on a laptop in my bedroom, that is beyond wifi router range). It is because I have such a shitty internet connection that I copy everything to a DVD so I don’t have to re-download it again (and my DVDs don’t get scratched as I know how to treat them properly).
With the exception of Diablo III, I don’t have any games that require I be connected to the internet simply because I’m doing a digital download. The only games I’ve ever had that had such a requirement were MMOs, and that’s because there is no single player game…and now Diablo III because Blizzard so decreed. All my Steam games that aren’t MMOs, however, have offline play mode that works just fine if my internet connection is down or the Steam servers are offline.
I have no problem if you don’t have to connect to play, as long as I can backup the download to re-install later if I wish. But just because you don’t have to connect now doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future, especially if download only become the norm.
Steam allows you to play in off-line mode, you can re-install any time (you’d need your internet connection for that), or you can back up your games by just imaging the right directory (that’s what I do) so if you have to blow your system away you simply have to restore the image. You could also just copy the directory and then copy it back to the new system, but that’s more a pain in the ass for me.
Like I said, a lot of the things folks are worried about in this thread Steam already has addressed. If it weren’t for Diablo III, I’d NEVER buy another game any other way. It’s the perfect system for me. I can uninstall games that I don’t want to play anymore, but they are still listed (in gray) in my Library…and if I want to play them in the future I merely have to re-download them (if I haven’t imaged them previously, or copied the directory they are in). I can play offline if my internet is down. And I can buy new games (on sale a lot of the time) any time of day or night and have them down on my system in an hour or over night while I sleep if it’s a huge game.
This is my experience. I’ve had internet service interruptions that last as long as two weeks, and yes, even the games that SAY that they can be played offline really, really want an internet connection.
Out of curiosity, which games? I’ve never had any issue playing, say, Sins or one of the Total War games I enjoy when my internet is down. Or Fallout 3/NV.