Sony: Gamers Don't Want Digital "Right Now"

[StewShearerOld]

Sony: Gamers Don't Want Digital "Right Now"

Sony executive Guy Longworth believes physical games may have a longer lifespan than some think.

The future is digital. So sayeth many within the industry. It's an opinion that's not without factual backing. Recent trends have begun to point more and more to a decline in the purchase of physical games, coupled with <a href=http://news.softpedia.com/news/Digital-Game-Sales-Increase-by-33-in-One-Year-Say-Tracking-Firms-341777.shtml>an increase in digital sales. It's a future that some in the industry are clearly banking on. Microsoft, for instance, has made no bones about its intention to more <a href=http://gamingbolt.com/xbox-one-still-has-cloud-features-for-first-party-games-committed-to-digital-in-a-big-way>heavily integrate digital content and capabilities into the Xbox One. Just recently, it was confirmed the company would be investing a whopping <a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/125313-Microsoft-Spending-700-Million-to-Back-Xbox-Live-Cloud-Servers>$700 million to expand on data facilities with the aim of furthering its cloud-bases services.

While Sony is no stranger to digital sales and has, in the past, invested its own <a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/118212-Sony-Buys-Gaikai-Cloud-Gaming-Service>heaping sums of money into things like cloud gaming for the PS4, the company plans to take a fairly balanced approach when it comes its reliance on digital distribution. "I think the reality is this," said Guy Longworth, senior vice president in charge of PlayStation brand marketing for SCEA. "Our digital business is growing fast, and we have incredibly strong partnerships with our key retail partners as well. What we try to do is offer a relatively level playing field and let the gamers decide. We're not trying to advantage them, we believe in consumer choice." Longworth notes that presently, for many gamers, this choice leads them to traditional retailers. "It's clear that the vast majority of the people want to go down to GameStop or Best Buy, they don't want to buy it online right now. How that might change in the future is kind of hard to predict. People might be quite surprised, I think physical games will be around a lot longer than some people think."

Source: <a href=http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-06-24-sony-most-gamers-dont-want-to-buy-online-right-now>Games Industry


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[wulfy42]

I keep saying that all they need to do is pass the savings on from digital sales to the consumer, and almost everyone will go digital.

It's cheaper to sell digital. No hard copy of the game, packaging, manuals, no shipping, and no stocking fees or percentage of the sale taken away by the stores.

It's a significant amount of savings per digital copy sold, and currently digital copies sell at full price.

Drop digital copies by $10.....and you will drop the number of people who buy physical copies drastically. That will also solve the whole "used game" problem they are always complaining about.

But oh well, I've said it a million times already.

 

[wooty]

Good man, I still prefer my physical copies. Theres still no better feeling than actually going into town and being handed your new game on release day while having a chat with the blokes serving you. Theres a lot more personality in it than just "please log into PayPal".

Plus boxed retail sales keep people in jobs and make town centers look livable, but thats a different (yet also important) matter.

 

[The White Hunter]

I keep saying that all they need to do is pass the savings on from digital sales to the consumer, and almost everyone will go digital.

It's cheaper to sell digital. No hard copy of the game, packaging, manuals, no shipping, and no stocking fees or percentage of the sale taken away by the stores.

It's a significant amount of savings per digital copy sold, and currently digital copies sell at full price.

Drop digital copies by $10.....and you will drop the number of people who buy physical copies drastically. That will also solve the whole "used game" problem they are always complaining about.

But oh well, I've said it a million times already.

That would definately lend itself to increasing the market share of digital games but it'll still be a long time until phytsical copies truly die out.

People like to own things, to have a physical thing to hold. It's part of our nature to like tactile things and a physical copy appeals to that.

It's why you can still buy CD's and why CD's still make money.

 

[Roxas1359]

Hooray, someone actually gets it! I love having physical copies of my discs and having the cases with them. Digital Distribution would work more if they were to offer the type of sales that Steam or GOG will have, and make it so that the prices would go down from time to time.

 

[TiberiusEsuriens]

Digital is totally the future. Key word here is 'future' because currently digital is not nearly as convenient as physical copies.

For a company like Sony of Microsoft to make digital steal the show they have to show how much more convenient it is, through cheaper games, the ability to resale (even at a consumer loss) due to bad purchases, and day-1 downloads (there's money in being able to play a game before the stores open to sell it).

The harsh reality for them is that even with showing the benefits, the infrastructure has to be there to support it and ours (in the US) currently isn't. I wanted to try Planetside 2 since it was F2P, and I had to wait two days (two days!) for it to finish downloading. I have Comcast broadband, and it's claimed speeds don't match anywhere close to reality in a busy city (near D.C. of all places).

If the major backers of digital want to make real progress they need to send a ton of financial support to initiatives like Google Fiber.

 

[Ninmecu]

*Points to latest Jimquisition*

/thread.

On topic however. I personally don't mind Steam. It isn't the Be All End All, far from it. But the fact that I never feel cheated buying from them, makes me more inclined to purchase, especially knowing eventually, inevitably, they will come down dramatically in price and I won't feel too bad if it turns out the game suck(s/ed). Some rental thing would be awesome, or even an option of refund after 4-5 hours of gameplay-Not after purchase, because download rates are slow as sin up north here in Canada. But gameplay, which in the games I play would barely scratch the surface.

 

[neppakyo]

This Sony guy knows what he's talking about.

Personally I prefer physical copies, especially with collectors edition. Nothing is better than a physical artbook in your hands, and a case to show on your shelves.

We still have to wait for reliable highspeed, it's pretty fractured in North America, and a lot of ISP's put low bandwidth caps in place, and with games hitting the 50GB mark it eats bandwidth.

captcha: rodents of unusual size - MS in a nutshell.

 

[Covarr]

I'd bet digital sales don't get nearly the bump during the Christmas season that physical sales do, and what bump they do get is no doubt significantly aided by physical gift cards.

Seriously, digital gifting is a pain, because most services offer no way to buy a game now and send it on a later date. This can be frustrating when I see a sale the day before my sister's birthday, for example, and know that if I want her to not get the game early, I have to buy it at full price the next day.

P.S. Thanks

 

[Something Amyss]

I keep saying that all they need to do is pass the savings on from digital sales to the consumer, and almost everyone will go digital.

It's cheaper to sell digital. No hard copy of the game, packaging, manuals, no shipping, and no stocking fees or percentage of the sale taken away by the stores.

It's a significant amount of savings per digital copy sold, and currently digital copies sell at full price.

Drop digital copies by $10.....and you will drop the number of people who buy physical copies drastically. That will also solve the whole "used game" problem they are always complaining about.

But oh well, I've said it a million times already.

This is the company that wants us to buy digital copies of PS Vita games but still charges exorbitant prices for proprietary memory cards. If they're still trying to whack you for the storage, I don't think they're going to get the "cut the prices and everyone benefits" just yet.

 

[synobal]

As a PC gamers I don't remember the last time I used my CD Drive/DVD rom drive. I don't even have a blue ray drive because I'd stopped using my DVD rom drive by the time it became affordable for me to get.

 

[GAunderrated]

*Points to latest Jimquisition*

/thread.

Pretty much this ^. It's not that gamers don't want digital over physical, its just that they provide no benefits for the consumer going digital yet. They refuse to make something that hurts them in the short run but benefits them in the long run.

Console's have always thought about the short term sadly. I love them to death but that doesn't take away the fact that most of their decisions are often knee jerks and not well thought out plans.

 

[kajinking]

Oh gamers want digital but what they want is WELL IMPLEMENTED digital.

Steam is an example of a well done digital system, not perfect but well done.

Giving us digital without any benefits to counteract the risk is not a good system

 

[omega 616]

I don't like this digital crap, it's very ... dull. I still, all these years later, get a little thrill and excitement picking up the empty box, walking to the counter, paying then making my home to play it.

With digital it's just a matter of purchase, download and play ... there is no sense of grandeur or build up, you could say "what about watching the download meter increase" and to that I say "you know this...


And you think "why couldn't I have done that? Why was that a cutscene?" the same thing applies here, watching a bar go from left to right is passive but if I walk home with my game in hand I can walk faster to get home quicker. I'm not pushing x to buy it, I'm picking it up, walking to the counter and paying for it.

My buying new/used is 50/50 ish (I'm not thinking "well , I bought new last time so I guess it's used this time), and I feel that is an ok medium ... still support devs and some times I get a deal.

The problem with steam is if I get bored of a game I'm stuck with it, with a CD/book/car/toaster I can sell it or give it away. I don't like this idea of tattooing a game onto my steam list, I have 28 steam games (some of which were humble bundles) and I have them now but I would be ok getting rid of a lot of them. Every time I look at that list I think "I spend money on that and I don't even want it any more/at all"

I have VVVVVV with 0 secs played, steel storm: burning retribution with 47 mins played, E.Y.E divine cybermancy with 27 mins played, Braid 24 mins played ... etc all of them I could happily get rid of but nope 'cos digital is so awesome!

(-.-)

 

[MrBaskerville]

I will always prefer having a physical copy, i like how reliable those are. You can always put your copy into the machine and your good to go, it really feels like you actually own the product. While digital is a lot more shaky, i might be able to play my psn games right now, but only for as long as Sony supports Psn on ps3. It´s very uncertain and not something i´m going to rely on (i once owned Mortal Kombat 2 on psn, but it got removed from the service, so i no longer own it :/), so if i can find a physical copy, i´m going to buy that instead of the digital version.

It might have been different if ps4 supported ps3 psn games, but since it doesn´t i´m just going to assume that they will never be carried over.

 

[Lightknight]

More correctly, we don't want all-digital right now. I mean, there are two heavy things going against it.

First off, the default HDDs for both consoles is 500GB. That's all fine and dandy but a game like Uncharted 3 is 40Gbs. That's a current gen game, not next gen. I can easily imagine 100GB games or more with that in mind.

Secondly, current infrastructure can mean that you have to spend days downloading a game before you finally get it. I had a decent internet connection when I downloaded Uncharted 3. It over 1,000 minutes when I could have driven to the store and been back home in 30 minutes with a disk in hand at around the same price or cheaper.

So console manufactures could leterally have the perfect system with petabytes of storage and really cheap digital download products hosted by a flawlessly fast cloud server farm but still not be able to remedy the second problem. Maybe when every town in America has google fiber then we can consider something like this. This is a nice feature to have for smaller and especially indie games. But we're absolutely not there for massive titles.

Kudos to Sony for figuring it out. Yes, some day digital downloads will be completely efficient and desireable for most people. But we may be looking at decades unless cable companies get their acts together. Fortunately Google is scaring them into action.

 

[Andy Shandy]

Well yeah, that's because - on consoles anyway - we aren't seeing any of the benefits of digital right now.

Honestly, I wouldn't mind going digital with consoles. I don't have any particular attachment to most of my game boxes - hell, I'm running out of space for them. And it would be easier for my lazy ass to sit down, be comfortable and let something download than to trudge into the city centre in the cold and rain (this is Scotland I live in after all), buy a game, and then trudge all the way back again.

However, at the moment, there are no benefits (besides not needing space for those aforementioned boxes anyway) for console users going digital. So maybe Microsoft and Sony should work on that a bit more.