Console Digital Distribution is Terrible

Can an external HDD be attached to the PS4X1 to take all that memory?

Xbox One supports external storage as of the June update.

You can replace the PS4's internal hard drive easily and without voiding the warranty, but it doesn't support external hard drives and I don't think Sony is planning to.
 
Are there ever good sales on DLC? Specifically the Mass Effect 3 DLC on 360? I don't want to spend $60 more to enhance
complete
the experience I already own.
 
A recent GamesBeat article went up detailing how retail has capitalized on digital. Apparently, most of the season passes for Ubisoft games in Q1 2014 were actually sold at retail.
 
Microsoft tried to change the distribution model and presented this on the 2013 E3 presentation and we all know what followed. They couldn't get the deals with publishers, people didn't understand the idea (message was poorly communicated) and started puking all over them.

Re-sellers buy for high price in bulk. Publishers like this because they can count on this money way more in advance. Also, they would be a useless middleman and being ripped out of the market by the power of the internet.
 
That when they ban your account you can still install and play your games.

Yeah, that PSN thread a few days ago is terrifying. I've gone mostly digital for the Wii U, but mainly because everything has either been free or extremely discounted. As someone with kids (one broke my MK8 disc getting it out of the case within a day) and not a lot of storage space, going digital should be very appealing to me. Unfortunately I'm aware of the drawbacks and they are simply too great. If I'm going to be renting a game, it should come at a rental price.

Capped connections are another aspect. I might be able to get all my stuff back if something breaks or is stolen, but I'm going to have to meter it back out. Insurance would otherwise pay for me to get back any games I really care about physically and get other, newer items if I wish.
 
I don't know. Even the distribution policies are pretty far behind Steam and other digital PC stores. Sony and Microsoft are getting there, and there have been a lot of steps forward since the PS4 and Xbox One launched.
--Sony just started doing pre-loading for all regions.
--Microsoft still hasn't allowed digital pre-orders for all upcoming games.
--Consoles only recently started doing automatic background patching.
--PC stores still offer much better pre-order and sales incentives: 10% off the price, digital extras, free classic games, etc.
--Digital items you can buy and sell with credit towards games.
--Customer reviews.
--Message boards for each game (there's MiiVerse).
--Do PS4 and Xbox One let you view logs of what friends have been playing and for low many hours (I honestly don't know)?
--Wishlists.
--Gifting.
--4 packs.

I consider distribution to simply mean "I buy a game on the digital store and it is delivered to me at a timely manner depending on my internet connection. Also, the games are available on the same day as physical"

thus to me the actual distribution is fine. the things you mention are totally valid points, but aren't really a factor in the distribution IMO
 
It's fine on PC because there's actually competition, while that simply will never be the case on consoles because of the way it inherently is. It's a closed market. There aren't 10 different digital storefronts that are all trying to undercut each other, there's only 3 digital store fronts that aren't trying to undercut each other.

You don't get to just use the word "competition" as though the mere presence of multiple stores makes it so. PC digital download storefronts don't undercut each other, by and large. Valve doesn't set prices on games. Valve never gives up its 30% cut. Valve also lets developers and publishers print an infinite number of keys for free and resell them anywhere at any cost with no cut to Valve. The stores that do give up some of their 30% cut do so because they're just reselling Steam keys, and the amount of the money the publisher is making is still comparable. The biggest innovation in pricing in the last few years have been indie bundles, which again exist because of Steam key resale possiiblities.

Imagine we're talking about Batman: Arkham Dancefest 2016. And it's on Amazon and it's on Steam and it's on 80 other DD services. Why would there be price competition between the services? WB sets the price on each. If WB wants the game to be $10, it can make the game $10. If WB sets the price to $10 on Amazon, they have full power to do so on Steam as well. Valve isn't going to ask them. Valve doesn't care. Valve has pre-planned sales events and they sent out a mass email to all publishers saying "well if you want to put your shit on sale set some prices using our tools if not good riddance". They're not pushing price curves lower. And they wouldn't give up their 30% cut for anything. So WB puts the game on for $10 on every service. Now it's possible that GamersGate, since they have no costs associated with selling a Steam key, is willing to help knock the game down to $8 by giving up some of their 30%. But there's no change on the publisher side of things, and ultimately what you get is a Steam key which you redeem on Steam and play on Steam.

And we're talking about peanuts. We're not talking about the structural pricing differences between retail and digital on consoles, right, we're talking about 10-20% around the margins as a few-month head-start compared with Valve's pricing. Like, I am not convinced any digital retailer ever actually has "better" sales, the question is where does a game first hit a particular pricepoint, we're really talking about a few weeks. It's always stuff like "oh, Amazon had this Sega pack on for $8 like a month and a half before Valve had a similar pack on for a similar amount!" That's not really competition, it's just differing timing on sale events.

Pricing strategies are based on the publishers knowing that PC is primarily about the long-tail, and what they lose in up-front sales they make up for with a longer sales curve helped by aggressive price stratification. Each sale you drop the price further and soak up more of the demand at that price level. I don't think WB is going to drop their game prices faster because of competition between storefronts, I think they're going to drop their game prices faster because they look at the data, they see what best suits their goals, and they decide to do it.

And then there's Origin; where 99.999% of stuff that's sold is not on Steam. Why would there be price competition between two entirely disjoint systems? If I want to buy Battlefield 4, that's on Origin. It's not on Steam. Origin and Steam aren't competing against each other to sell be Battlefield 4.

If you want to argue that competition is leading to better featuresets, then that makes sense. But it doesn't seem to be, to me. Most of the PC DD storefronts have no particular featuresets, and what features they do have (like GMG's digital trade-ins) are totally underused and have not been copied by anyone. Meanwhile, when new features are added to, say, Steam, they seem not in any way connected to the kind of features competitors have. No one has anything like trading cards, or like an inventory trade system in general, no one is doing meta-games for their sales, no one was supporting OSX or Linux or allowing cross-buy for OSX and Linux when Valve added it, no one else had anything like Family Sharing, no other services have service-wide F2P functionality (which Valve added). I'm not mentioning this to praise Valve or say they're doing a good job. I'm just mentioning it to point out that they don't seem to be reacting to external competition from other DD stores.

You know what I do think has driven competition for Valve? Early Access stuff. They missed out on Minecraft and as more new games adopted that model, they worried they were missing out. So they introduced Early Access. So the one thing that I feel like actually was competition didn't come from a rival service, but rather a rival idea.

Impulse, which had a client, now doesn't. GMG, which has a client, doesn't use it. I believe GameFly has basically been phasing theirs out. Desura is basically abandoned. All the new competitors like Amazon, Humble, ShinyLoot, and the different bundle services don't use clients at all. Seems to me like from the client side, there's actually less competition now than ever. Origin and Battle.net are the only two healthy clients, and neither of them have any content overlap with Steam.

The reason console DD sucks compared to retail is not lack of competition between storefronts, it's unlimited inventory size. If you're retail, rotten stock sucks and you want to move it. You pay upfront to buy stuff and you want to sell it quickly. You have limited space, you don't want stuff that won't sell, and since your business model is built around used games and the same game being traded in many times, you want churn. So there are two actors who can drop the price: the publisher, through MSRP drops and price protection; and the retailer, who can take a loss just to liquidate the stock.

On digital storefronts, including on PC, there's one actor who can drop the price; the publisher, and there's no limit to the amount of stock, and there's no upfront cost. This means that there's no pressure to move copies now rather than later. It means that if a publisher doesn't have the resources to try to push their stuff (there are defunct companies whose products get price drops at retail but who would never even fill out the form to drop a price on a digital service, let alone work with someone like Microsoft or Sony to get their game placed in a smaller sale), no one is dropping the price. In the OP's Call of Duty example, Call of Duty gets garbage sales on PC as well, and it gets garbage sales because Activision does not want older games cannibalizing the sales for newer games--in other words, they don't want their own games competing on price with each other.
 
Get used to it or get ready to become a PC gamer. That is the digital future of a closed box and sadly I don't trust them to get the pricing right.
 
I own nine next-gen titles.

One is physical, the rest have been bought digitally. The only reason I bought one physically is because when I first bought an Xbox One, I didn't want to be waiting to play because of my crappy internet.

Thanks to the console being region free, all of the digital titles have been bought from the US store, so it works out at about £37 a game.

I realize this workaround isn't ideal, despite being perfectly legit. More needs to be done; realistic prices, digital limited editions, preorder bonuses etc, but so far it has made sense simply because it works out cheaper to buy them digitally.
 
You don't get to just use the word "competition" as though the mere presence of multiple stores makes it so. PC digital download storefronts don't undercut each other, by and large. Valve doesn't set prices on games. Valve never gives up its 30% cut. Valve also lets developers and publishers print an infinite number of keys for free and resell them anywhere at any cost with no cut to Valve. The stores that do give up some of their 30% cut do so because they're just reselling Steam keys, and the amount of the money the publisher is making is still comparable. The biggest innovation in pricing in the last few years have been indie bundles, which again exist because of Steam key resale possiiblities.

Imagine we're talking about Batman: Arkham Dancefest 2016. And it's on Amazon and it's on Steam and it's on 80 other DD services. Why would there be price competition between the services? WB sets the price on each. If WB wants the game to be $10, it can make the game $10. If WB sets the price to $10 on Amazon, they have full power to do so on Steam as well. Valve isn't going to ask them. Valve doesn't care. Valve has pre-planned sales events and they sent out a mass email to all publishers saying "well if you want to put your shit on sale set some prices using our tools if not good riddance". They're not pushing price curves lower. And they wouldn't give up their 30% cut for anything. So WB puts the game on for $10 on every service. Now it's possible that GamersGate, since they have no costs associated with selling a Steam key, is willing to help knock the game down to $8 by giving up some of their 30%. But there's no change on the publisher side of things, and ultimately what you get is a Steam key which you redeem on Steam and play on Steam.

And we're talking about peanuts. We're not talking about the structural pricing differences between retail and digital on consoles, right, we're talking about 10-20% around the margins as a few-month head-start compared with Valve's pricing. Like, I am not convinced any digital retailer ever actually has "better" sales, the question is where does a game first hit a particular pricepoint, we're really talking about a few weeks. It's always stuff like "oh, Amazon had this Sega pack on for $8 like a month and a half before Valve had a similar pack on for a similar amount!" That's not really competition, it's just differing timing on sale events.

Pricing strategies are based on the publishers knowing that PC is primarily about the long-tail, and what they lose in up-front sales they make up for with a longer sales curve helped by aggressive price stratification. Each sale you drop the price further and soak up more of the demand at that price level. I don't think WB is going to drop their game prices faster because of competition between storefronts, I think they're going to drop their game prices faster because they look at the data, they see what best suits their goals, and they decide to do it.

And then there's Origin; where 99.999% of stuff that's sold is not on Steam. Why would there be price competition between two entirely disjoint systems? If I want to buy Battlefield 4, that's on Origin. It's not on Steam. Origin and Steam aren't competing against each other to sell be Battlefield 4.

If you want to argue that competition is leading to better featuresets, then that makes sense. But it doesn't seem to be, to me. Most of the PC DD storefronts have no particular featuresets, and what features they do have (like GMG's digital trade-ins) are totally underused and have not been copied by anyone. Meanwhile, when new features are added to, say, Steam, they seem not in any way connected to the kind of features competitors have. No one has anything like trading cards, or like an inventory trade system in general, no one is doing meta-games for their sales, no one was supporting OSX or Linux or allowing cross-buy for OSX and Linux when Valve added it, no one else had anything like Family Sharing, no other services have service-wide F2P functionality (which Valve added). I'm not mentioning this to praise Valve or say they're doing a good job. I'm just mentioning it to point out that they don't seem to be reacting to external competition from other DD stores.

You know what I do think has driven competition for Valve? Early Access stuff. They missed out on Minecraft and as more new games adopted that model, they worried they were missing out. So they introduced Early Access. So the one thing that I feel like actually was competition didn't come from a rival service, but rather a rival idea.

Impulse, which had a client, now doesn't. GMG, which has a client, doesn't use it. I believe GameFly has basically been phasing theirs out. Desura is basically abandoned. All the new competitors like Amazon, Humble, ShinyLoot, and the different bundle services don't use clients at all. Seems to me like from the client side, there's actually less competition now than ever. Origin and Battle.net are the only two healthy clients, and neither of them have any content overlap with Steam.

The reason console DD sucks compared to retail is not lack of competition between storefronts, it's unlimited inventory size. If you're retail, rotten stock sucks and you want to move it. You pay upfront to buy stuff and you want to sell it quickly. You have limited space, you don't want stuff that won't sell, and since your business model is built around used games and the same game being traded in many times, you want churn. So there are two actors who can drop the price: the publisher, through MSRP drops and price protection; and the retailer, who can take a loss just to liquidate the stock.

On digital storefronts, including on PC, there's one actor who can drop the price; the publisher, and there's no limit to the amount of stock, and there's no upfront cost. This means that there's no pressure to move copies now rather than later. It means that if a publisher doesn't have the resources to try to push their stuff (there are defunct companies whose products get price drops at retail but who would never even fill out the form to drop a price on a digital service, let alone work with someone like Microsoft or Sony to get their game placed in a smaller sale), no one is dropping the price. In the OP's Call of Duty example, Call of Duty gets garbage sales on PC as well, and it gets garbage sales because Activision does not want older games cannibalizing the sales for newer games--in other words, they don't want their own games competing on price with each other.

This 'Wall of Text' has just critically struck OP's argument.

Damage: Everlasting
 
The reason console DD sucks compared to retail is not lack of competition between storefronts, it's unlimited inventory size. If you're retail, rotten stock sucks and you want to move it. You pay upfront to buy stuff and you want to sell it quickly. You have limited space, you don't want stuff that won't sell, and since your business model is built around used games and the same game being traded in many times, you want churn. So there are two actors who can drop the price: the publisher, through MSRP drops and price protection; and the retailer, who can take a loss just to liquidate the stock.

On digital storefronts, including on PC, there's one actor who can drop the price; the publisher, and there's no limit to the amount of stock, and there's no upfront cost. This means that there's no pressure to move copies now rather than later. It means that if a publisher doesn't have the resources to try to push their stuff (there are defunct companies whose products get price drops at retail but who would never even fill out the form to drop a price on a digital service, let alone work with someone like Microsoft or Sony to get their game placed in a smaller sale), no one is dropping the price. In the OP's Call of Duty example, Call of Duty gets garbage sales on PC as well, and it gets garbage sales because Activision does not want older games cannibalizing the sales for newer games--in other words, they don't want their own games competing on price with each other.

Snipped and bolded. Stump dropping the knowledge and making every other post superfluous - I'll try to not be redundant. When retailers drop a price on a product, they're either a) getting the publisher to pay for it through price protection (it's my understanding this is a rare thing, though), or b) if they're Gamestop, getting a significant benefit in keeping used game sales going, or c) getting a product that's not selling off the shelves, so that they can get a product on the shelves that will sell.

Publishers could drop prices on storefronts, but for what? I think they may have given up on competing on price, and instead are happy to collect money from suckers - I mean loyal customers who are happy to full price. Publishers don't get any extra benefits from the price drop, either - at least none that they can quantify and trust (exposure for a franchise and brand doesn't seem to fit for pubs, who probably have done numbers on if it actually results in higher sales for sequels).

None of this is to say it isn't bullshit that the prices are higher digital, even before considering the resale value of physical which is another effective discount on the price. But unless publishers themselves want to compete on price, it won't happen. And publishers don't want to compete on price, because they want to sell the next blockbuster title at $60 bucks a pop to justify the money they pour into developing new games. In their view, selling a bunch of titles for $1 or $5 would be shooting themselves in the foot.
 
Distribution is fine, pricing is bad.

I'm a physical media guy so I'm still going to buy a physical version when I can but I'll definitely buy digital if the price is too good to pass up.

Nintendo is by far the worst offender though. Virtual Console prices are just way too high and considering there is no cross buy, it makes it even worse.

I do think there is probably more than meets the eye to digital pricing. The big 3 can't undercut retail too much or they risk angering them and losing distribution.
 
EU console digital is worse. They actually charge more then retail does on day 1.

At least in the US things are normally $59.99 outside of deals on day 1. On EU PSN games are 69:99 standard but 49.99-59.99 in shops.

What wonderful country are you in? In Finland games are €64.99 minimum at release, almost every store has them for €69.99 though. It's why I'm going with US PSN.
 
Digital distribution is perfect on PC because of very low prices and retro-compatibility. You can run 20 years old games without major issues.

On consoles? Usually too expensive and you can forget about running on your PS4 an indie game you bought on PS3. It's ridiculous and won't change.

I was looking forward to getting a next-gen console until I realized that I couldn't play my XBLA and PSN games on them. At first I didn't believe it because it's so stupid, but lo and behold, it's true.
 
I could use the closet to store other things and why would I buy the physical copy, throw the box away, and hten have to store the discs in some binder somewhere. What advantage do I get from owning the disc opposed to just having a button to press on a screen and launching it immediately.
Price and ownership.
 
If you want to argue that competition is leading to better featuresets, then that makes sense. But it doesn't seem to be, to me. Most of the PC DD storefronts have no particular featuresets, and what features they do have (like GMG's digital trade-ins) are totally underused and have not been copied by anyone. Meanwhile, when new features are added to, say, Steam, they seem not in any way connected to the kind of features competitors have. No one has anything like trading cards, or like an inventory trade system in general, no one is doing meta-games for their sales, no one was supporting OSX or Linux or allowing cross-buy for OSX and Linux when Valve added it, no one else had anything like Family Sharing, no other services have service-wide F2P functionality (which Valve added). I'm not mentioning this to praise Valve or say they're doing a good job. I'm just mentioning it to point out that they don't seem to be reacting to external competition from other DD stores.

You know what I do think has driven competition for Valve? Early Access stuff. They missed out on Minecraft and as more new games adopted that model, they worried they were missing out. So they introduced Early Access. So the one thing that I feel like actually was competition didn't come from a rival service, but rather a rival idea.

I think this here IS a sign of the gap that exists between console digital distribution and PC digital distribution. It at least says Valve is doing a much better job of selling people digital games than Sony and Mirosoft are. It's at least doing a better job of being a storefront. And I'd also take it as a sign that Valve is ahead on the innovation curve when it comes to digital feature sets. Things Sony and Microsoft did relatively recently were pretty much already happening on Steam. Steam Family Sharing was probably in response to Microsoft hyping up the idea (even though they aren't actually doing it). Apple is also planning to start its own Family Sharing program with iOS8.

Impulse, which had a client, now doesn't. GMG, which has a client, doesn't use it. I believe GameFly has basically been phasing theirs out. Desura is basically abandoned. All the new competitors like Amazon, Humble, ShinyLoot, and the different bundle services don't use clients at all. Seems to me like from the client side, there's actually less competition now than ever. Origin and Battle.net are the only two healthy clients, and neither of them have any content overlap with Steam.

The reason console DD sucks compared to retail is not lack of competition between storefronts, it's unlimited inventory size. If you're retail, rotten stock sucks and you want to move it. You pay upfront to buy stuff and you want to sell it quickly. You have limited space, you don't want stuff that won't sell, and since your business model is built around used games and the same game being traded in many times, you want churn. So there are two actors who can drop the price: the publisher, through MSRP drops and price protection; and the retailer, who can take a loss just to liquidate the stock.

On digital storefronts, including on PC, there's one actor who can drop the price; the publisher, and there's no limit to the amount of stock, and there's no upfront cost. This means that there's no pressure to move copies now rather than later. It means that if a publisher doesn't have the resources to try to push their stuff (there are defunct companies whose products get price drops at retail but who would never even fill out the form to drop a price on a digital service, let alone work with someone like Microsoft or Sony to get their game placed in a smaller sale), no one is dropping the price. In the OP's Call of Duty example, Call of Duty gets garbage sales on PC as well, and it gets garbage sales because Activision does not want older games cannibalizing the sales for newer games--in other words, they don't want their own games competing on price with each other.

(Just an aside, there's probably a little bit more content overlap between Origin and Steam than you might think. Origin's front-page space goes to EA's Origin-only games but it sells a lot of non-EA games, many of which are basically Steam keys. I bought my Tomb Raider Steam key from Origin).

You may have a point with the unlimited shelf space idea. When I browse PSN or Xbox Live, I definitely feel like Sony and Microsoft have less of a desire to move copies of games. Those same conditions haven't stopped Valve from trying like hell to sell you games. And I'm not just talking about sales either. Even Steam's pre-order incentives feel more enticing than what's on consoles, which are only just getting around to the idea of digital pre-orders. Valve constantly tries to switch up how stuff in their store is presented too: showing what your friends are buying, featuring what games have recently gotten big patches, allowing gifting, four packs, bundles, etc. It just seems to me like Valve is just as invested in moving stock as GameStop. Same thing with Amazon really. The Apple App Store also feels particularly committed to getting things sold.

Of course I agree with you that competition isn't really that huge a factor. I still think the bigger factor is that companies like Valve and Apple don't have to worry about pissing off retail. Retail has given up on PC games mostly as far as North America is concerned, and Apple has figured out how to sell its own hardware (and the retailers continue to sell it). Digital is all they have to focus on when it comes to selling software, so they do everything they can to get digital copies sold.
 
I live in a country where a new game costs the equivalent of 100 USD. Simply because everything is imported. Everything game related is MUCH more than advertised when they get out here. So changing the XB1 digital storefront to US and buying these games for 60 USD is a godsend.

Obviously I can't relate to the OP but i can say that without digital distribution i wouldnt even be buying games at all.

in my opinion, I think we need to be made more aware of the business behind DD. We need a resource that explains why it is the way it is, I dont think we are knowledgable enough to truly question any companies motives when pricing these things.
 
PlayStation at least makes strides in the digital market with preorders and reloading. Shame the digital prices for most games are so poor considering you are paying for a service. Hell, at least PS+ gives away free current-ish games.

I agree with that.

I never buy games digitally that I can get physically at retail on a Blu-ray Disc, or on a DVD in Xbox 360's case.

The only exception was Dungeons & Dragon's Chronicles of Mystara. I got that on PSN, but I will also soon get the Japanese retail release since it's not region locked.


I have a couple of questions that're semi-OT.

a.) With PC games, can I buy a PC DVD and not ever have to use Steam if I don't want to? Last time I had a gaming PC was 2011. I bought BF3 and Skyrim on DVD but (IIRC) I still had to use Steam. I have nothing against Steam at all, don't get me wrong, I'm just wondering if using it is 100% required.

b.) When do we expect PC games to start coming on Blu-ray Disc? I'm guessing probably never because of Steam / DD and also probably because a large percentage of PCs out there don't have a Blu-ray Drive, the majority still have DVD drives.
 
This 'Wall of Text' has just critically struck OP's argument.

Damage: Everlasting

I didn't really have an argument... it just seems that there's not much of a reason to buy most games digitally. Stump's post seems to be more an explanation of WHY then a refutation.
 
WB sets the price on each. If WB wants the game to be $10, it can make the game $10. If WB sets the price to $10 on Amazon, they have full power to do so on Steam as well. Valve isn't going to ask them. Valve doesn't care. Valve has pre-planned sales events and they sent out a mass email to all publishers saying "well if you want to put your shit on sale set some prices using our tools if not good riddance". They're not pushing price curves lower. And they wouldn't give up their 30% cut for anything. So WB puts the game on for $10 on every service. Now it's possible that GamersGate, since they have no costs associated with selling a Steam key, is willing to help knock the game down to $8 by giving up some of their 30%. But there's no change on the publisher side of things, and ultimately what you get is a Steam key which you redeem on Steam and play on Steam.

I don't think WB is going to drop their game prices faster because of competition between storefronts, I think they're going to drop their game prices faster because they look at the data, they see what best suits their goals, and they decide to do it.

You should all listen very closely to this man. He is 100% correct.
 
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