Ben-DutkaHope you're ready for a future where digital distribution is the primary model of video game delivery. It's a-comin'.
SCEA Senior Vice President Scott Rohde considers this a "natural progression" and although he does say that traditional retail products won't disappear entirely, the trend is obvious and clear.
In speaking to The Interactive , Rohde said in regards to moving towards a digital distribution model- "It's something we want to do, and it's inevitable."
"I think this is a natural progression. You’ll start to see more and more digital offerings across the board. And this is not just a Sony thing, you’re obviously going to see it across the board. It’s the way the world is progressing, not just Sony."
Rohde talked about a new initiative for PlayStation Plus subscribers, multiple top-quality free downloads, and the fact that games are shifting towards online services. As examples, he mentioned Call of Duty Elite, Diablo III (the game has an "always-on" Internet requirement), and MMOs like Free Realms . He added that Sony is experimenting with new stuff for the future, and finished:
"There is no definitive answer about where we will go or where the whole industry will go… the whole industry is in an experimental phase to understand what consumers want and what makes them happy."
It probably is "inevitable." But it'll be interesting to see how the long-time hardcore gamers respond.
<<<<"I think this is a natural progression">>>>
As a gaming collector, it's become an un-natural progression.
And my 2,359 carts & discs would like a word with you.
Carts, ATTACK! lol
I agree!
My game tower will be at the front lines alongside……well, behind yours.
Lol BSaint!!!
Q!
"play.experience.enjoy"
Onward plastic soldiers!
CHAAAAARGE!!!
I have no plans to buy a digital only system.
I'll as soon actually play my existing massive game library!
I bet I have DECADES of gameplay stockpiled!!! 😀
You think the morons would learn from the PSPgo…
What a flop!
You have my 150 RPGs and my mastered Materia. And my sword.
Last edited by TechSmurfy on 6/24/2012 11:19:18 PM
I think it's only inevitable because of the used game market. Getting rid of used game resale by going all digital is a great money-making mechanism for any publisher and helps keep the smaller studios aloft.
…then again, not having to print the discs and ship them is another big attraction.
Huh. So yeah, I guess I see where he's coming from.
Diablo 3 being always online was a big turnoff for me and the real money auction house. Also if gaming on consoles goes pure digital i won't want to be apart of it and just stick to PC.
Perhaps Mr. Rohde I speaking out of turn. Hasn't Kaz, a number of times, stated the opposite?
It does seem inevitable, I just hope it's a long ways down the road. The whole online service thing is where I draw the line though. I'm pretty sure there will always be a market for great SP experiences that don't need to be online like Beyond.
I feel similar World! I think if gaming becomes a service that would be tragic in some ways. Not to have a physical item is pretty sad.
Sony will push the digital distribution hard… primarily it will remove the biggest issue for them and that is piracy. I quiver at the thought of how much Sony has lost over the last 15 years due to piracy in all forms… not excluding movie downloads.. it quite substancial… must be a billion or two at the least…
Q!
"play.experience.enjoy"
Q, I don't see digital distribution stopping piracy.
There is nothing under the sun, moon, or stars that is unhackable.
The flaw in your logic, is with discs, piracy was a task of making the machine just accept a disc as legit. With a DLC only machine, hackers will be driven from the get go to focus every bit of effort into cracking the core security of the machine. It might put them off from the start, but the efforts will be doubled up from the get go. The prompt to dig deeper and right away will ultimately leave the system compromised sooner and more severely than the current systems have experienced.
The PS3 resisted hackers for so long, only because Sony gave us Linux, and so let the "nerdier than thou" have a sandbox to play in. When people got paranoid of Sony's limits in Linux, almost all early hacking efforts I had heard of were focused on jailbreaking the system to allow Other OS full hardware access, so the Linux side would be a more powerful machine. After Other OS was stolen from us, efforts shifted to restoring Other OS…
Ultimately, Sony's crackdown only hastened the cause of piracy, by putting hackers into overdrive to overcome Sony's crippling of the PS3's features. Pirates were able to ride the coat tails of hackers like GeoHot, because to continue using all the listed features of your hardware, you had to hack it. Once the doors were opened, they could never be closed again.
Companies never learn. They refuse to learn. PSPgo should tell them the market is not ready for a DLC only system. The proliferation of PS3 hacks AFTER they removed Other OS should make it clear that restricting consumer freedom only breeds dissent, hate, retaliation, and compromise of their machines security.
It would be a mistake for Sony to choose this route exclusively.
There is also the issue of always on internet. Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft are all urban companies, with always on internet access…
I work at a Gamestop in rural Minnesota…
When people approach the PC section, my first question: "Do you have high speed internet?" or "Do you live outside of town?" That question tells me to not sell them half of our titles.
Not everyone has always on, or reliable high speed internet. these companies would spit on those not "blessed" with the urban life, or the luxury of spending $50 each month for internet. My father doesn't even have internet. My mother does… She lives in town. My brother, has internet. He lives 1.5 miles out of town, and his speed is capped at about 768 Kb/s to 1 Mb/s depending on the day. Further out and it drops. There's a wireless service in the region, but it advertises 64K, 128k, 256K speeds for exorbitant prices. Like $60 for the low speed, and pricing upwards from there.
High speed internet is still a luxury, or even an impossibility for some people still!
We even have a few regular truckers who have small TVs and game consoles set up in the sleeper of their cabs. Various laws dictate they can only drive X number of hours per day, and X number of total hours a week. It's to prevent accidents with big rigs. That leaves truck, literally bound by law, to stay parked, sometimes entire weekends, in Walmart parking lots and truck stops. These people need something to keep them from going stir crazy! Even as we start to stop carrying PS2 and Gamecube titles, these customers are already seeing less and less available to them. Many games are online games. Single player experiences have been fewer and fewer, though gems do exist, like Skyrim and Fallout. What happens next gen. What if Sony demands an always on internet connection. A mobile customer like that will simply be unable to upgrade.
So… Yeah…
I guess the way I see it, is Sony can sell a DLC, persistent online gaming console if they like. Thing is though, I, and MANY OTHER people, will not be wasting a glance or a dollar on it. I still have a valid game library that I can enjoy for years to come, even if they fail to provide the game system I'd be interested in for the next gen. I'll laugh as I finally have time to play the games I've passed by, and watch Sony squirm as hackers utterly violate and pillage their system's security.
Last edited by richfiles on 6/24/2012 2:27:30 PM
Well I don't think digital distribution will make everyone happy. It certainly won't make me happy. If digital distribution is along side physical media, fine. But this isn't something all consumers will embrace, like they think. It will require more space, and faster Internet, thats something that will always be limited and it's 2 very important factors.
Im cool with gaming going digital all my pc games are digital so I no longer have attachment to physical media and if I did I certainly wouldnt stop gaming.
I'm coming to grips with digital formatts for handheld devices but for consoles it's a no go. How can games continue to get bigger and better if they limited by today's bandwidth, speed and download limits? Not to mention HDD space.
No thanks Sony. If you go all digital I'll bail.
Last edited by Jawknee on 6/23/2012 1:08:33 PM
In the article, Ben notes that Rohde says "traditional retail won't disappear entirely", so I don't think (at this stage…) anyone's talking about entirely digital everything, but more that unlike at the start of the PS3s life, when it was mostly retail with a little digital, that by the end of the PS4 it will be most digital with a little retail, at least in the developed world (Sony have made a point of saying part of their continued focus is on physical media because they understand that in a lot of the world, the infrastructure for all-digital just isn't there).
Which is where PC is now – there are PC games that are 20GB (and a little larger), and 10GB is not unusual at all. It may be a bit much to expect most people to be downloading that now, but in ten years time I'd be surprised if the infrastructure and plans aren't there. And if they aren't, then I'd be _very_ surprised if Sony made a decision that ruled out a significant number of customers. So breath easy :).
I still think it is real strange to walk through our city without seeing any music stores. There used to be 2-3 really large ones just in the main street, and tens across the whole city.
I've come to grips with full digital music format and I am sure I will do the same with games. But it will be strange to look back.
Last edited by Beamboom on 6/23/2012 1:50:32 PM
I miss movie rental places, so many jobs lost to this digital stuff…
While it may be a shame that music retailers went out of business, music in general just doesnt take up the space or resources that games would.
I do know that music aficionado's may have terabytes of music; millions of songs.
The point being that to download a song or two, your network and your hdd wont be strained at all, but a game or two? At today's standards (or last gen's) downloading two games would kill the average person's internet bandwidth. And then there's storage. If you've got an extensive collection at 50 games, and each game is maybe 3 gigs (i think thats a huge lowball estimate), thats 150gigs thats needed for games only – on a console thats a huge amount of your storage.
Digital distribution is great for extras and classic and small games, otherwise….i dont like it.
There's still one final itty bitty small privately owned place in the small town I work that rents out games. EVERYWHERE else around me is gone. And I live in a small city of nearly 400k.
Of course, this guy still makes money on NES, SNES, GENESIS, N64, etc etc rentals. And he sells awesome collectible video game memorabilia, too. It's tucked away in this small itty bitty store, too. A tiny slice of paradise. Owner is a bit creepy, but since I'm not a teenage girl, I go in all the time.
Oh yes I miss movie rentals too! The smell in those stores, the posters, the shelves sorted by genre… Yeah, rent a movie, pick up some snack while we are there, the stress with returning the movies the day after… I miss that stuff too.
It's almost *too* easy now. Some of the charm is gone.
And OMG I feel old when typing this 😀
Last edited by Beamboom on 6/24/2012 2:40:48 PM
I'm a massive collector of games and a full shelf to show off and lend to friends/family is a big thing for me, but, even i can appreciate that download is the future.
That being said though, the old cliche of internet infrastructure being at a point where it's viable still rears it's ugly head. With my current net set-up i could buy about 2 games a month before blowing my data usageand losing web access for a month, and to be honest, until the cost of downloadable titles drops to reflect the new model, i just can't jump fully onboard. The new spec ops digital version is up on psn for £44.99 i believe , and yet to buy a printed disk, shipped, in box from my local supermarket is about £15 cheaper, how does that make sense?
The thing that stood out most to me was the part about making multiple AAA titles free on PS Plus. I noticed the current ones on there and am excited that there could be more (even if I'm still a little pissed that they had inFamous 2 for free immediately after putting it on sale, tricking people (read: me) into buying it just a few days before it was free).
I like my shelves full of game cases thank you!
Gone will be the days where you can lend or borrow games between friends. And if digital distribution is the future… there are going to be long hours download potentially a 20 gig game or higher if it has a lot of cut scenes.
Here's hoping there will be still hard copies in stores for the big games.
Keep playing.
Well, I think the digital future ultimately will be one where data is streamed into a console's RAM from the cloud and then processed from there. So I think this idea of waiting many hours to download games is a temporary one. This way pubs can have total access to consumer playing trends. How long they play. How often we die or restart etc.
Yes, the future will treat us like subjects harvested for our data ( x files theme plays 😉
Also to add to that I see that's how the free to play model will unfold. We'll buy hardware. We pay for a service (things become free that way, like PSN plus pretends it) we have access to whatever content, but as we spend more time and energy we'll be presented with options to augment the service, reduce game ads, or access more content etc. I think each time a person signs up for PSN plus and Xbox Live we moving closer and closer to this digital future. People are making the transition happen right now. Self fulfilled =p
I also think this transition is more about shifting the balance of how consumers obtain their content and to return more marketing control to the content publishers. I really doubt we'll see any kind of lock out of physical media for a long long time. There are advantages to having retail presence. When I read about companies like Crytek switching to free to play I suspect it'll lead first that way but eventually come to a physical media if the demand seems high enough. Ultimately I see this a maturation of obtaining and distributing content and not the eliminatation or immediate extinction of obtaining content.
I suspect next gen will present digital only consoles, possibly free under service contract, as a low cost entry point, but also see plenty of physical based hardware that can do both, a lot like the PS3 does now, just more feature rich and and made more accessible to a wider range of consumers.
Amazon has super street fighter 4 arcade edition for $10 right now as a digital download for PC. After 2 failed installs it somehow works when I load it up… Anyway it looks absolutely gorgeous in 1080p with all details maxed. Accomplished even with a 6770m GPU on an i5 dual core. Anyway, it's digital, which is the supposed wave of the future so if you got PC and want to see what's it like doing shoryuken's with a keyboard … come on, don't we all?
( actually works just fine with game pad or USB joystick) have at it!
Last edited by Temjin001 on 6/23/2012 5:01:37 PM
But doesn't it take up a whole lot of bandwidth to put stuff up on the PSN store, to be downloaded by millions? Right now, digital distribution only takes up like 10% (or thereabouts) of people's purchases when buying software, so perhaps it's managable how it is – for the time being. However, when/if it goes up to something closer to 100%- with a hell of a lot more people downloading (potentially at the same time) – wouldn't pressing the data onto discs and retailing them be a cheaper alternative…?
(I haven't a clue – just (baseless) theorizing :P)
Seems to work alright on PC with Steam, and there's quite a few large DL games on there. There's only a 30-40 million userbase (and far less 'core' users), but there are a good number of people using it.
I'm a bit of an environmentalist, and while I like collecting games, the beauty of digital is that it removes the need for a bunch of plastic packaging and product, as well as the transport required to get it anywhere. My concern, however, is that it also means less retail jobs, and that as a society we haven't got any clue to cope with the reduction in retail jobs that a more digital age results in. So I try and get as much stuff online as I can, but buy my PSN cards in stores for it!
As long as there are keen collectors, I think there will always be retail products – so don't give up collectors :). And there aren't enough keen collectors for it to materially mess with the environment, so deffo don't feel bad about it :).
I prefer having tangible media but I'm not unprepared for the digital takeover and I'm easily adaptable. But I'm most certainly not a fan of this always online Diablo 3 approach, where even to play a single player campaign means being connected.
I get it with the multiplayer but single player online, feck that.
Also this move towards micro-transactions. Another online aspect you don't 'need' to buy into but if you don't the experience no matter how much the publishers say will not, will be less enjoyable, without the extras purchases.
But back to everything being digital. I was against it when all music became digitalized yet I've an IPod full of music and rarely play the CD's. So I'm not surprised this is gonna happen to the console gaming world. Despite our 'Collections', we will adapt regardless of our deep will not to accept it right now.
I do miss playing records, tapes and cd's. But I love what comes on them, so much more than how they're delivered to never play them again, even if that means digital copies of the originals.
Last edited by frostface on 6/23/2012 6:19:57 PM
sure sure scott, whatever as long as your paying…….
OK. After paying for over 25 PS1 RPGS from PSN and putting them on my PS3. After buying a couple PS2 games and doing the same. After buying over 20 PS3 games from PSN. I finally realized why digital games will not be the end all product.
My ps3 just went out on me. It cannot play games over around 30 minutes before it gets hot and shuts down.
Sony rules say that you can only transfer said games to 4 or 5 systems. THats it. Let me be perfectly clear, SONY HAS A RECORD OF THEIR PRODUCTS BREAKING DOWN AFTER A YEAR OR TWO. Remember back in the 80's when Sony was accused of purposely making products that would break down so a consumer would have to buy another product?
I used to buy Sony PC's, but after a few years I always ended up having tons of problems with the systems.
My Sony TV gets real hot after a year of service. I stopped buying CD players of Sony's years ago because of it. I have went through 3 PS3's so far. Pathetic.
So to make a long story short, I will, eventually have to go back and buy ALL THE GAMES I bought on the PSN, AND TO A COLLECTOR OF VIDEO GAMES, this is a NO NO!
Buying games online is cool, especially online only games. But I like to collect games and pull the old one's out and play them from time to time.
If I have to go back to Nintendo to keep that dream alive, so be it.
Oh look, Sony. It's poo. Kinda reminds me of you O_O
If it all goes digital then I feel there would be a new kind of module for the gaming industry and that would look a look like the cell phone companies..
Whether it be books, movies, or games
I will always prefer a tangible copy to a piece of property that sits somewhere in a digital folder I don't actually own.
Case in point for NOT liking all digital format…I purchased the "all inclusive" bundle for DLC on the PSN for LA Noire on my old PS3.
When I fired up LA Noire on my new PS3 I didn't get them all back. I have NO idea how to go about complaining about it, or where to go to get it resolved. This has always been my fear about all digital format. Well, that and customer service. I DESPISE having to call a helpline only to get someone in another country who cannot understand what your issue is and has no clue how to fix it.
Give me a brick and mortar store and a real person to talk to PLEASE.
Well you just go ahead and create an all digital console, just don't expect me and many others to go out and BUY it, which AFAIK is the plan. I prolly have enough games to last me a lifetime as it is already anyway…
Of course the retail market won't disappear completely. But it's not what we are all concerned about; it's not about keeping the physical media market alive, it's about keeping the RIGHT physical media market alive. The hardcore fans should keep this market, not the casual ones. The casual gamers/consumers are fine with digital distribution, they wouldn't want to be collectors anyway.
I mean, it will make no difference to me if only triple-A FPS/TPS get physical releases. I don't care. I won't care. I want my less-than-mainstream RPGs and adventures, now barely alive at PSN/XBLA/handhelds, making their way to my HOME console as a physical media.
Just like that Blu-Ray PSN collection (w/ Journey) Ben talked about a couple of days ago. Make a (physical) Wild Arms collection for PS3. A Xenosaga collection. Port all the handheld games that we're missing. Stuff like that. C-mon!
Last edited by TechSmurfy on 6/24/2012 11:29:12 PM
Big thanks to PSX Extreme for reporting on this. We just published the full interview at The Interactive: http://theinteractive.com/2012/06/sony-interview-scott-rohde/
This comment thread is one of the most thoughtful I've seen on the subject across the web; you people really know your stuff, most of you.
I agree the retail market won't disappear; the relationship between publishers and retail is too important, and there's a lot of money to be made as folks have said in collectors' editions, etc.
Rohde and I never spoke about the future of retail, only digital. Anyway, read the full interview for some more insights!
And if you enjoyed this interview, consider following The Interactive. We're a new site but if you're interested in these discussions, digital entertainment and finding cool stuff to download, we're working really hard to be the place to be. Tell your friends. 😉 Thanks for reading!
Thanks for the compliment to our members. 🙂
However, we're not necessarily big fans of people promoting other sites in our Comments section. I'll let it slide this time but please bear in mind that the Comments aren't an advertising spot for the competition. 🙂
Sorry, I thought it pertinent since it was the complete interview you reported on — wouldn't do it otherwise — and we're definitely not competition. Thanks for the heads up.
Thank god I got fibre-optic! Bring it on!