A plethora of announcements this past week further cement the age of digital distribution for video games.
Psychonaut was officially released on Steam this week (as I had previously mentioned). I expect digital sales of the game to approach or surpass the original retail sales.
Activision has also announced they will bringing several of their past games to Steam (including the first two installments of the popular Call of Duty franchise).
Meanwhile, Eurogamer has announced their entry to the digital distribution era. They’ve teamed up with Metaboli to launch a new games on demand service. Once again, this focuses on games that have already been on the market for at least 10-12 months. One day soon, we’ll start seeing AAA titles released in stores and digitally on the same day (on networks other than Steam, of course, since they’ve already done it with Half-Life 2).
I have said before that brick and mortar chains will have to adapt to the changes in the marketplace if they expect to survive the digital transition. Well this week, EB Games announced their own network for downloadable games. Chris Kohler offers up a scathing review over at his blog. It looks like EB Games doesn’t have all the kinks worked out yet, but it’s a step in the right direction. It’s encouraging to see retailers finally start to “get it”.
Finally, here’s an interview with Mike Logue, the managing director of Gamestation (a large UK retailer owned by Blockbuster) where they also mention downloadable games. Logue does not anticipate any drops in retail sales in the near future. In fact the company continues to expand its retail stores in anticipation of further growth. Logue does at least acknowledge that downloadable games will play an important role in the future (i.e. will be financially important), but is very vague of the company’s actual investments into such technology. Oh well, at least they’re thinking about it. Let’s hope they don’t miss the boat.
All in all, it’s been a pretty busy week when it comes to digital distribution. There is certainly a trend to re-release older games who have finished their retail cycle, in order to breathe new life into them. For now, the digital market is still being used as a way to stretch the lifetime of games and tap in an ever growing secondary stream of income (a bit like DVD releases of movies). The next step is to move to concurrent retail and online releases.
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