Digital Distribution

In this essay I will be talking about the advantages and disadvantages of digital distribution and whether it should become the main source of purchasing games, I will also be talking about the arguments for and against digital distribution and why people would and would not want digital distribution to take over.

Digital Distribution is the delivery of media content such as audio, video, software, and in this case, video games. The term online distribution is typically applied to freestanding products; downloadable add-ons for other products are better known as downloadable content or DLC.

The biggest and most obvious benefit to downloading games online is immediate enjoyment. It’s possible to buy the game at any hour of the day or night, there’s no need to stand outside shops in the early morning. In fact, you don’t even have to move to purchase it. With this ability to download the game to any computer, it’s easy to play it anywhere and enjoy auto-patches without having to hunt through desks and filing cabinets looking for disks or validation keys. The most attractive thing about digital distribution is the fact that there is no clutter, no boxes, plastic wrapping or manuals.

Whilst digital distribution makes a very convincing argument, there are still significant benefits to owning an actual physical copy of a game. For one thing, faster installation, depending on the internet connection that you have, it’s possible that you could be waiting several hours just for one game to download completely, whereas with an actual disk the process is much, much faster.  If you have the physical copy of a game, it’s easy to lend them to friends and you can play them even when you don’t have access to the internet. The strongest argument for buying physical copies concerns the collectors; those who love looking at their game collections, counting it, cataloguing it and crooning softly to it like Gollum with the One Ring are highly unlikely to be talked into buying games digitally.

The cost for digital distribution is often less for the publishers than physical copies because they’re not paying for packaging, shipping or point of purchase costs. Even better, if something happens to the game such as it stops working, you can uninstall it and re-download it again and you don’t have to spend money buying it all over again.

While it is true that boxed games usually cost more, there’s the possibility of saving money by buying them used which is something that digital distribution doesn't offer. It’s also possible for you to sell or trade your games once you’re doing with them to stretch your gaming cash.

Another major advantage is the fact that digital distribution is a blessing for indie game developers as it gives them the tools to spread the word of their game, to have easy access to a large market, and ultimately the potential to have a hit on popular distribution services like Apple’s Appstore, the Android Market, XBLA, Steam and the PSN Store. Online markets are so huge today that it gives indie developers the opportunity to get their concepts and ideas out in to the world, so that it may be ridiculed, or so that it becomes a worldwide phenomenon.

The last advantage that I’m going to be talking about is the discounts that the markets offer, if you download games from Steam, there are plenty of sales and offers on all the time which makes games even cheaper to buy.  For example, they do certain days where you can earn achievements and claim prizes in “The Steam Summer Camp Sale”. This is a good way to advertise because promotional sales give players further motive to download games.

In conclusion, I believe that digital distribution is amazing and minor disadvantages shouldn’t sway people away from what is inevitably the future of gaming. Although, believing that digital distribution is going to be the future of gaming, retail copies of games are going to be around for a very long time, so if you still want to get the soundtrack, art book, character figure from the Collector’s edition of your favourite game, you still can, and will be able to for a very long time.