Phantasy Star: Fringes of Algo

There's a lot of talk in the gaming industry about digital distribution being the future of game sales. Some gaming companies, including Sega, are favoring it over physical releases for some titles. Phantasy Star Universe just became a digital offering, for example. But according to a new report, digital sales aren't performing as well as some would lead gamers to believe. They're only 10 to 20% of total sales.

Do you think the game companies are jumping on the digital bandwagon too soon? If 80+% of games are still sold on physical media, does that suggest gamers just don't prefer digital versions of games?

Even in this day and age, where almost everyone have access to some extent to the internet, I don't think it's true that EVERYONE can go and download the games they want. Plus, for now, people see digital media as something you don't really own (which is true) compared to a physical media.

Personally, I love the Digital Download. For my PSP, it means less loading time, access to all my library directly on my memory card, no overuse of the lens reader for accessing the UMD. It's really wonderful. But I can understand people who prefer to stay with physical media, where a game will always stay in your profession, where you can lend it to a friend, or sell it when you're done. Or even use it as a part of your collection.

Yes I think DD is the future of gaming....but not before another 10 years, or even more. Right now, I don't think people are quite ready

It's not all that surprising. Aside from places like Steam and Good Old Games (and maybe Direct2Drive but whatever) who else is doing much in the way of digital distribution? Console min-games that recieve no physical releases whatsoever (Bionic Commando Rearmed, MM9 and 10, etc)? Given that light 20% of sales is a highly significant number, especially when one also considers there's no packaging, no shipping, no publishing rights to deal with, no hard copies to manufacture, etc. And if 20% of video game sales are now digital, that means places like Steam, GoG, Direct2Drive and the rest actually have cornered 1/5th of the market. That's huge!

This would only be a poor figure if every single game was available online from one centralized location. Since that's far, far from the case, there's no negative to be had currently. Valve's doing absurdly well, after all.

Oh, man, and this is including console sales after all? Well there you go then. It's hard for DD to conquer the market if half the games aren't available for DD, don't ya think?

The article isn't too clear on it, but I think this was just console games and excluded PC games. Near the end of the article there's something about 21 million PC games downloaded vs 23 million retail purchases. So it would seem that digital distribution is going much better for PC than consoles.

I believe some of that can be attributed to the fact PC gaming has always had some sort of download available for gaming whereas for consoles it was a physical media for over 20 some odd years [longer I'm sure]. Of course consoles are more like PC's all the time but the idea of having a "cartridge", "CD", or "DVD" in your possession has been ingrained in our heads so trying to undo that will take some time.