The past couple of weeks have seen a bevy of news related to digital distribution, a topic I've already spent some time ranting about. Of most importance is the revelation that Nedgame, Holland's home grown version of GameStop recently announced it is boycotting sales of the PSPGo. Obviously they just realized that selling users a piece of hardware sans a removable media drive is essentially shooting themselves in the foot. How can they continue to rip off customers by treating used games as their own personal "buy low, sell high" stock market if there is no removable media to trade* - the thing even comes with built in storage!
Forgive me if I'm wrong but I don't remember Circuit City boycotting the sale of mp3 players because they wouldn't be able to sell customers CDs for it (then again, they're out of business now - whoops!). This is the new gaming order here folks, and as far as I'm concerned the sooner price-gouging B&M-used-game-mega-stores go the way of the Jaguar, the better. But Nedgame also claims that Sony is creating a monopoly on software sales which raises an interesting point. Is a distribution service a monopoly?
Back in the 80's Nintendo didn't quite create a monopoly on game software, they just controlled what games were allowed on their system. It worked pretty well from a QA standpoint, though some cried foul. Sure we may miss out on the occasional deal of the day or liquidation sale noted at places like CAG, but if you look at a service like Steam you see that great deals happen all the time, not for any particular reason, but simply to give games more exposure. Without competition among distributors, though, we occasionally see some fishy pricing practices, notably that downloadable titles are more expensive than their boxed retail brethren. Sony promises to combat this discrepancy, but that doesn't necessarily mean lowering the prices on downloadable titles. After all, if there are no boxed retail versions to compare them to, parity is achieved, no?
That small economic speed bump aside there's only one more real barrier to full acceptance of digital distribution and that's advertising. How with the hype machine ramp up for Final Fantasy XIVVLXQ1ß if there isn't ample acreage of GameStop storefront upon which to affix posters? Fortunately a small change to the way our distribution interface works can fix that problem. This is evident by the way firmware 3.0's addition of "ads" in the XMB helped a little known title achieve record sales. It's easy for a small indie title to get lost in the shuffle of weekly updating, but a little reminder in the XMB can make all the difference in the world.
*I actually have no idea if Nedgame is as nefarious in their practices as GameStop. I'm just assuming. Haven't heard any rumblings of a GameStop boycott. Yet.
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