Don’t hate the game, hate the vendor..

I just finished up my three and a half month summer vacation (I know, I know, you aren’t sympathetic).  During that vacation I played lots of different games, including board games and disc golf, as well as testing out the 4th edition D&D rules.  Oh, and I painted up a bunch of Chaos Space Marines for Warhammer 40K (maybe I will post some pictures in the next week or two).

However, my real topic for today has to do with the purchasing of video games.

In short, I’ve pretty much sworn off ever going back to the video game store ever again.

That doesn’t mean I’ve sworn off actually playing the latest and hottest new games.

I won’t say that it was a particular customer service experience that made me give up going to GameStop or similar stores.  Well, unless you count the fact that at most GameStop branches if you ask to see the PC games they sort of look at you funny.  In most such stores the PC games no longer get ANY wall space at all, and at best get one or two free-standing shelves in the back of the store.  Used games for the Playstation2, meanwhile, eat up almost half of the wall space.

Over the summer, I downloaded and played a game called Europa Universalis III and several of its expansion packs.  The expansions for this game were never even shipped to retail.  The ONLY way to obtain such games is through Internet based direct download services.  I also downloaded the full version of a game called Mass Effect.  That was lots of fun.  Towards the end of the summer, I had a bizarre urge to play the latest Tiger Woods Golf game on my PC.  It was only $20, and I downloaded it directly from Electronic Arts.  The game isn’t perfect, but I got my money’s worth.

After a few lengthy delays and some technical issues in the early going, Valve software’s Steam delivery service has become a pretty robust application.  Even when I switched over to a new computer last winter I had no trouble getting my Steam account up and running and my old games re-installed on my new machine.

Now, there is something to be said for the fact that most Internet download services charge something close to full retail price for a purely digital product with no packaging and no discs, etc.  Some would even call this a ripoff.

The fact is that most game manuals these days aren’t worth the paper that they are printed on, and I already have a drawer that’s mostly filled with old games that I never play and which probably wouldn’t even run on my Vista system.  Thus, the loss of the physical game package doesn’t really bother me.

One great advantage of ignoring my local video game retailer is that I save on the gas money involved in making the trip.  I also avoid Tennessee’s rather obnoxious 9.5% sales tax.

Yes, the download of a large game file can take several hours even with a cable modem internet connection.  The electricity costs a few cents, but I don’t really care about the bandwidth since I am already paying for the phat pipe even without the game downloads.  I might as well use the pipeline that’s available to me.

In the future, retail is going to be completely irrelevant for any sort of “niche” or independent game developer.  The PC market, of course, is full of such developers.  Here the megapublishers and distributors are becoming redundant even faster than in the music industry.  I say, let the distributors die.  The Internet will set us free…

There are other factors working against the future of Gamestop and its brethren.  It turns out that we are going to be stuck with the current generation of consoles for another three or four years.  Sure, these stores will be able to stay in business by selling the latest “Guitar Hero” game and the related controllers.  However, the major game publishers are becoming increasingly upset about the market in used games.  Electronic Arts and other companies don’t make a single penny when you purchase a used video game at retail.  These companies realize that the future is in downloadable content and micro-transactions.  Who’s to say that the next generation X-box will emphasize physical game media at all?  Why not just move the console retail channel 100% online?  That way the game companies make sure that individual users buy individual licenses, thus breaking the power of the game pirates and the game re-sellers.

Such a time is still a few years off, but I think that we will see things trend in this direction over the next three or four years.

Just imagine the stories that you will be telling your grandchildren…

“Well, kiddies, when I was real small, if wanted to watch a movie, we had to get in our cars and drive to a place called the Home Video Store, where we could rent tapes and dvds.  We’d bring our movies home, and watch them, and then bring them back to the store the next day.  And we liked it that way!  I remember when I even used to rent video games for a few days at a time…”

“But grandpa!  That’s silly!  How can you carry a video game?”

Oh yes, we will live to see that future.

In the meantime, I’m going to start my online pre-order of the new Spore game that’s coming out in the next few days.  I know I’ll be playing my copy on Day 1.  Can you say the same?