Schnapple

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Schnapple


  1. OK I had some dental surgery last week I had to recover from so I'm just now listening to this episode but I just wanted to point out that the letter asking about The Receiver was mine. I was listening in the car and turning at an intersection when they blurted out my name which caused me to nearly turn off the road since for just half a second I thought someone was trying to tell me something. The part where they acted like they were just going to skip the question was especially weird as I'm yelling at my phone "NO! DON'T SKIP MY QUESTION!" in the privacy of my car.

     

    As for why I thought the game was called The Receiver instead of just Receiver, I blame goty.cx.


  2. I feel like the conversation about digital distribution being the future that everybody is just going to have to accept and live with is overlooking a few things. For one, there's the matter of ISP's pushing back hard against bandwidth hungry content delivery services by imposing strict bandwidth caps on their users. Digital distribution cannot be the primary method of providing games when many markets are being constrained by such caps.

    Like, Canadian here, and my bandwidth cap... Is seriously confusing, it seems to change every time i go check what it is, but i think it's around 80 gigabytes right now.

    You show me Max Payne 3 being a 30 gig download on Steam, and it it's just NOPE. Not happening.

    I mean, and there's another issue with there being a massive, shocking disparity between the number of registered users on Live and the number of 360's apparently out in the wild. (Like less than half, the last i checked.) There's probably a ton of RROD'd 360s in there, admittedly, but somewhere out there is a huge market of people that is not plugging their systems into the internet at all. This is probably not a market you can sell digitally distributed games to.

    Not trying to make a stubborn argument in favor of physical media or the consoles, but i feel like the all-digital future is further away than people want to believe it is. (You know, and honestly, i do still prefer having a physical thing. I feel like the digital distribution services are a horrible quagmire of user rights issues just waiting to happen.)

    OK, believe it or not I'm the guy who asked the question in the panel.

    And yeah there's a ton of ways this can go down but one of the ways I can see it happening, and I briefly mentioned this in the question, is the effect that a day-and-date release might have in the console space.

    As in, right now people who want an Xbox 360 game day one have to go to the store to purchase a physical copy (along with all that entails, like hoping there is a copy there, catching shit from GameStop on whether you preordered it, etc.). People who want a PC game day one usually just have to buy it on Steam and wait for it to download/decrypt (and the downloading part can be done almost completely ahead of time)

    So what happened to PC at retail? It really died away. I mean yeah there's still shelves at Walmart and Target but it's nowhere near as big. Go to GameStop and it's a pariah. And yet PC game sales are still strong enough to encourage ports and exclusive games and Valve's income doubles every year thanks to Steam.

    So what would happen if 360 releases came out day-and-date on digital as well as physical? Would the stores rebel? And is fear of this what keeps this from happening?

    In the PC space, when Microsoft decides not to make digital gaming convenience a priority, Valve takes up the slack with Steam. In the console space, when Microsoft decides not to make digital gaming convenience a priority, then there's nothing you can really do.

    Anyway the gist of my theory was that the console makers can't go all-digital because the stores would kick them out (or they'd have to make the consoles not-cheap) but they can't afford long term to not go all-digital because eventually the public will demand it.

    And then I think about things like the rumored Steam Box console, or how someone could, to some extent, just go ahead and do that today. I guess really long term your TV stops being a TV and just becomes a screen with a different form factor than a computer monitor, and the device you hook up to it may or may not be what we consider a "console" today, may not be made by the companies that make "consoles" today, and may not have the line-in-the-sand distinction between PC and console gaming (i.e., today if you buy GTA4 on the PS3, you can't play it on your PC - at some point if, say, Steam was a "console" you might be able to).