I welcome the downloadable games market I hate owning a physical disc I don’t like clutter.

If consoles follow in the footsteps of steam in regards to pricing I wont have a problem.

I don’t think so, not when you look at the revnue breakdown and see who earns what out of developer, publisher, distributor and retailer (guess who takes the biggest chunk for doing the least work!) That sounds more like an argument of “Well, if I can’t sell it back to GAME for £20 then I want it to cost less in the first place”. Which is a false economy.

What’ll happen here is the big argument about WANTING something that’s not there, simply because it’s not there: like back compatibility.

People will moan about how transferable they want things to be even though, in reality, they won’t actually bother to use such a feature if it existed. Perhaps on a PC but not much on a console. Especially now that playing online negates the need to transfer a game to another location so your mate can play it.

Most arguments for cheaper games are usually extremely mercenary (“publishers owe it to me to make games cheaper! They need to understand my situation but it’s unreasonable for me to consider their situation”) and presented with little appreciation of how and why games are currently priced as they are.

This is also the reason of drm like the ones in spore – mass effect etc .
Not to kill piracy , but to kill secondhand market.

*head on keyboard*

If they start selling games that truly cannot be sold on into the pre-owned market or pirated then they could slash the price of those games in half and still end up making more money than they do now. No amount of shopping around is going to get you prices like that.

Of course, the flipside is that these games will sell at their starting value for much longer and not see a discount in a very long time.

Or would you prefer to go back to paying £50-£60 for a 16mb cartridge?

Furthermore, assuming publishers and developers can prevent the cannibalisation of their revenue due to piracy and second hand sales then they’ll probably be keen to offer incentives to consumers to draw them into an online purchase. (Which is something EA are already taking small steps to doing – particularly with respect to 2nd-hand sales)

It’s worth remembering that, presently, games are no where near as heavily laden with adverts or sponsorship as ‘cheaper’ entertainment media. Would you prefer cheaper games sponsored by McDonalds that have 20 mins of adverts before they begin and more ad-breaks after every hour of play?

As for the cost of games in general, if you complain about game prices and are paying RRP’s then you’re simply not shopping around.

Cool.

Man, the sooner that this is for all games, the better for me.

I’d much prefer to just download my games rather than have to go all the way to a Game store or wait for some postie.

How big is the PS3′s downloadable Burnout Paradise, btw? Anyone know?

*glasses, arms, nodding*

When it was spelled out for me it was a bit obvious. Sony’s really priming for it now. PSP games going DD day one, 160Gb HD SKUs, “proper” episodic games as testers, etc, etc, etc.

Exactly.

I’m sure that online gaming will be the future of games because the people who make the games won’t want to do anything else.

I didn’t ask Gibeau specficially what he meant by “online,” but I assume he meant online functions in general, not just MMOs.

There’s too much emphasis being placed on MMOs at the minute. The gaming populace in general appears to prefer smaller stuff.