I do enjoy the convenience of digital downloads, as has been mentioned, but I can’t see myself ever buying a new release that way. It’s generally more expensive, and at best the same price. Buying online for home delivery you are pretty much guaranteed delivery date delivery, and sometimes a day early - plus you have the physical media which is always comfortable.
I mainly use DD to buy oldish games or bargain games. Occasionally I use it because I’m too lazy to walk back into town to buy a game that I want there and then (I’m looking at you Sins of a Solar Empire).
By the way, after the semi-rant I just posted, I went and dropped $30 on Rockstar’s Steam catalogue. So I use DD, when it’s sufficiently cheap. I just don’t ever want it to be the central method of purchasing games.
I think I just had a watershed moment when I realized I was re buying stuff on steam because I didn’t want to go hunt down the discs, despite them being 12 feet away nicely organized on a shelf.
That firmly places me in the retarded category I believe, since I generally thought I preferred having the physical copy on the shelf.
Let’s ALL wank about language. You misspelled ‘there’. But actually I’m just trying to be funny.
All video games ARE digital content but their distribution is not, and since distribution is the topic at hand I think Zylon was right with what he said.
Games in the genres I like have all but completely disappeared off the shelves of stores, so I don’t have any choice but to buy downloads. Honestly, though, I like it a lot better. It took a bit of adjusting to at first, and I miss the excitement of buying a game in a store, and reading the manual on the way home, thinking about how great it’s going to be when I get to play it… but it’s hard to beat the convenience of reading a review of a game, downloading a demo, playing it, liking it, and buying the full version all in the same evening.
If language cops spent more time on more productive ventures instead of insisting that ‘hackers are not crackers’ we’d probably… have fewer language cops.
Hey! Keep your eyes on the road kid. I joke, but I love me some steam. A big case of CDs is just too much of a waste of space in my room, and, as has been said, being able to get the game/demo while you continue browsing, watching tv or however you feel like relaxing is a great convenience.
[Edit: For those of you keeping score at home, I incorrectly used me as an adverb, used a plural indefinite article for the single noun Steam, failed to capitalize a proper name Steam, the final sentence is terrible run-on, and the abbreviation TV should at least be capitalized.]
My biggest bitch with Steam is that they allow shit to install SecureRom. If its on steam there is no way in hell it should come with ADDITIONAL DRM. Especially not one as fucked up as SecureROM.
PLUS they don’t tell you which ones have SecureROM and which ones don’t. I think Valve have a moral responsibility to make this clear and I’m surprised more users arent holding their feet to the fire over it.
I have a boxed retail copy I bought on closeout of the original for under half of what Steam wants… Sadly you can’t convert Crysis CD keys to Steam keys the way you can some games.
Did you edit that me as adverb out, because adverbs typically end in ly… noob. I saw no Mely. maybe if we played some smash bros mely?
Also, steam doesn’t really have a moral obligation to alert you of DRM because that information is out there for anyone bothering to look. It’d be nice if they did alert you, but morally obligated? Not so sure.
I’ve been very happy with my downloading experiences. However, not all providers are created equal and this can become very apparent when you do the inevitable hardware upgrades every few years. I replaced my PC back in May, but there are still a few downloaded games that I can’t get to work on this computer. I’ve no doubt that if I cared enough to put in the time, I could resove the issues, but the point is that it shouldn’t be something hard to fix since it’s inevitable that buyers are going to be transferring from one computer to another. From that standpoint, the process should be simple and pain free.
Unless you mean the games you want to buy are not even being released in boxed, physical form, you do actually have other options. There are websites out there that stock practically any game you might want to buy unless it’s entirely out of print.
Anyway, I used to be more against downloads than I am now. I don’t think I’d bother to play a game on a PC that was not a download under terms similar or less restrictive than Steam.
PC game publishers have shown over the years that they are more interested in causing customers inconvenience in the name of protecting their content (not that there is anything wrong with that)… and getting the content via download avoids some of these issues.
I don’t have any problem with physical media on consoles though.
Why dont the language nazi’s fuck off to their nice little third reich of correctly spelled grammar concentration camps and let us discuss digital distribution of games. gah.
Me i have a very double feeling about digital distribution. I am looking to get a bussiness going in games retail, both new and resale of used stuff. Therefore, physical distribution is my intended livelihood. so i hate digital distribution for being the nemesis of my dream job.
On the other hand, as a user i love love love it. Its so convenient, accessible, secure, cheap and there’s the idea of my money going directly to Brad’s funky bunch instead of to the marketing drones of evil empire EA.
As a user, i wish my xbox worked exactly like my pc and steam. as a wannabe entrepeneur, i dread the day it will.
I like the physical ownership of games far too much to ever be interested in digital distribution except in cases where the game is too old to find physical copies of.
You missed an apostrophe there in ‘don’t’, Nazi should be capitalized, as should Third Reich, ‘gah’, ‘i’, ‘so’, and another four 'i’s. You also misspelled business, and don’t get me started on stylistic issues in there. Yes, I’m aware my first sentence is dubious.
ahem
Personally, I’m of two minds. For games that come with decent and important reference materials (Dominions III, for example), I will almost always want a hard copy. This is more for the reference materials than a physical disk, though.
For other games, my attitude is mixed; Team Fortress 2 is only good for multiplayer, so I’m not put out by the fact that I can’t play it offline, but for games with a singleplayer focused experience I’d want the default mode to be ‘playable offline.’
As a result, I rather like the way Impulse and GoG do things, and suspect I will be buying a lot through them in the future.
I bought Half-Life 2 on the PC four years ago, but never really got all the way through it. In addition, I lost the disks and the computer that I originally played the game on and also started using Mac desktops at home.
On a whim, I tried out Crossover games on my iMac, installed steam and behold there was my four year old copy of HL2. I downloaded it and played through it again to see how it plays in this completely different runtime environment.
Steam is still annoying in a lot of ways, but in the four years since I’ve used it they’ve added a lot of great stuff to the service, and you can’t help but be impressed that they will let me play this game that I had otherwise completely lost. And I don’t even need to run Windows for it anymore.
