The Incredible, Edible Disc

I have been hearing a lot of things about how Digital Distribution is going to be the future for video games, movies and music and other forms of consumable media. Now, while I can partially agree that the industries are moving that way, I don’t think anytime soon that we will be living in a world of download only in a couple of years. Here are just a few reasons why:

1. Bandwidth Caps (BDCs) – so much has been said about bandwidth caps that I don’t want to go back over them, but for this discussion, it’s really important. I know that several of my friends have a much more restrictive bandwidth cap than what I have to suffer through. Time Warner is one of the worst by having 5 GB BDCs a month. That is horrible. Any overages for that will result in a fee in the amount of $1 per GB over the cap used. With every generation, the games are becoming better looking and have more information in it, which in turn means it will be a bigger and bigger download. The average download for a full game is 4 GB so, let do the math: Two game downloads at 3.2 GB per game, is 6.4 GB total. If your cap is 5 GB then you have already blown your cap for the whole month, and you haven’t done anything but download games. What about e-mail, YouTube, and Facebook and other social networks?
2. No High Speed Internet – some locations of the country don’t even have what can be considered fast enough to download a game. Have you ever tried to download a song on a 56k modem? If not, try it and let me know how long it took, then multiply that time one-hundred times and you might come close to how long a movie takes. Then multiply that time by 4 and you have the same amount of time it takes to download a game. This is where the traditional discs come into play. That is their only REAL option. So what is the solution to DL only games: Streaming Games (see #3)?
3. The DRM Issue – when you buy a game that is download only, you don’t really own your game. By that I mean that you can play it, you can download it (Xbox 360, PS3 or PC), you can even let a friend play it on your machine, but if you try and take it anywhere but your machine, then you are out of luck. Even WORSE is that if the internet is down, or the DRM servers go OFFLINE, then your content isn’t even playable at ALL! So let’s talk music. Yes, I buy music off the internet. But I do not buy DRM’d music off the internet, and I refuse to buy music that has DRM that will restrict how I listen to my music. So, don’t try and sell me on the convenience factor of digital distribution, when you limit the convenience I had with discs. The same here can apply to movies.
4. Streaming Games/Movies and Internet Outages – everyone wants an internet that never goes down and is always there, but in reality, it’s not. There are internet outages from time to time and if you are required to connect to the internet every single time you play certain games (EA PC games, I’m looking at you, Xbox users would only be affected by online/MP only games such as Battlefield: 1943, otherwise you can at least play your game Single Player games offline) then you are S O L (And that doesn’t mean for standards of learning). So, why would we want to go that route?
5. Loaning/Trading In Games – this isn’t even possible for download only games. What amazes me is that an executive somewhere is telling me that I have to give up playing with discs because download only is the future? Why? If there are discs out there, then that is what I will be buying because if my cohort in crime (not really) SparkStalker wants to borrow Left of Dead or Halo 3: ODST (two games he actually already owns but for the sake of argument) he can. If I want to play more of a game besides what’s in the demo, then I can go to Blockbuster and rent the game. With no game discs, that will not be possible.
6. Storage Space – on this topic, I am going to focus on game consoles because game consoles generally speaking have the smallest hard drives (HD) out there. The Xbox 360, PS3 and Nintendo Wii all have small hard drives compared to laptop computers. The Xbox can have a HD 20GB in size at the smallest (this is of course discounting the Xbox Arcade model that has NO HD at all) and the largest Xbox HD out there now is 250GB (the CoD:MW2 consoles). The PS3 has something equivalent or less on both sides of the spectrum. Don’t even get me started on the Wii. Anyway, if you spend $300 on an Xbox that has a twenty GB HD, then you basically have room for four, maybe five games and that is IF you don’t want anything else on your HD. So, if you have five 3.2 GB games on your drive, then that’s 16GB of a 20GB HD. There are 2GB’s (I think) of space already taken up by system tools, and that gives you only 2GB for EVERYTHING else. That would mean that you have almost no room for any movies, music, arcade games (smaller sized games for cheaper price). And Arcade games are getting larger and larger every 6 months. And then there is the price of the HD, which for the Xbox, is ridiculous. All in all, not the biggest issue, but it still is an issue.
7. Price – this is a VERY important reason why (at least with games) that I am against digital distribution. If a studio wants to convince me that convenience is a factor, then price factors into that convenience argument. I will not spent $60 on an all digital game, when I can buy the disc for the same price. Why would I want to give up the choice of trading in/loaning my games? Why? Give me one good reason. Now, let’s say that I had a choice of Halo Reach for the Xbox 360. Digital download cost $35 and the game disc cost $60, and that I might go for (but honestly, I would probably still buy the disc because I feel more secure that way, but at least I would consider it rather than dismissing it outright). In other words, lower the price and we’ll consider it.

Every rule has an exception so let’s go over them.

1. Xbox/Zune Eco System – Xbox Live and the Zune Marketplace are two really good (mostly) integrated services. If you buy a game, movie, video, piece of Avatar clothing, add-on game pack, you can download it, delete it from your HD and then re-download it without having to re-purchase the content (of course you still have to be logged into your account which in that eco system is called a Gamertag).
2. Amazon On Demand – Amazon On Demand is perhaps one of the best services out there for purchasing digital movies. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s close to it. First, you can rent or buy movies for close to a quarter of the price. Case in point: I bought season 3 of Dexter for $11.88. The physical discs were $42.99. That is the type of cost savings that will propel me to purchase digitally. Also, with certain Amazon On Demand purchases, you can download the episodes/movies to your PC and play whenever you want without an internet connection and play them on a Roku player that is hooked up to your television. Price plus Ease of Use plus Real Convenience = Buy.

The conclusion is that digital distribution may actually be the future, but they need to solve the first seven points in this post in order to make it a true success. Good luck with that!