Miyamoto: Games will never be just digital

[Shrygue]

via Computer and Video Games (http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=220620)


Good news for all those mums and dads who've just bought Wii Sports Resort and are still a bit scared of the digital revolution; Shigeru Miyamoto has said that digital distribution will never become the sole way you buy your games.


Speaking in an interview with Mercury News, Miyamoto explained, "The hope for business departments always is how they can reduce costs. So if you look at digital distribution with the fact that you don't need money for packaging and things like that, it's great.

As a developer, it's not changing how much money you're bringing in; it really doesn't change what we're focused on. However, I think it creates a lot of opportunity for a lot of different developers. Personally, I'm one of those guys who, even if I have all the songs from iTunes, I want the CD as well. It's something that makes me - I feel more reassured with that physical media."

But what about games? "Entertainment is something that will not just become digital. If I look at Wii MotionPlus, this is something that you're not doing via digital distribution. The thing for us is we really don't see the future of video games being merely confined to digital distribution or moving solely or even to a majority of our products being distributed that way."

Our parents would say the same thing because they're still worried about entering their credit card details into a website. We just like having a cool box to look at. What about you? Have your say below.

[fpcreator2000]

I seems that Miyamoto Shigeru and I see eye-to-eye on this issue.

I guess it also has to do with age as well, but I feel most gratified when making that purchase and receiving that physical medium than I do the digital. Some I don't have a choice (ex. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 for Xbox Live), but the rest of the games out there I prefer the physical disk.

[apex05]

The biggest thing for me isn't just the feeling of ownership when you have the physical medium, to me it's about the restrictive DRM they'll include in the games and not being able to sell them when i'm finished.

[ComixSans]

i have to say the greatest game dev ever is wrong here and thats a shame.

Most people don't buy cd once there go start downloading there music. physical media is just disorganized clutter.

as a flash cart user i cant imagine going back to switching a load of carts all the time.

I hope nintendo doesn't fall behind the competition here. They need to really start getting behind digital downloads and offering new aaa titles.

[goshogun1]

i have to say the greatest game dev ever is wrong here and thats a shame.

Most people don't buy cd once there go start downloading there music. physical media is just disorganized clutter.

as a flash cart user i cant imagine going back to switching a load of carts all the time.

I hope nintendo doesn't fall behind the competition here. They need to really start getting behind digital downloads and offering new aaa titles.

Disorganized clutter? Some people actually like having game boxes lying on the shelf. I prefer solid media as opposed to data being kept somewhere.

Also, as a flashcart user you don't want to go back to switching carts? Its nice to see that piracy has made your life easier.

[Hypershell]

Gotta agree with Shiggy, here. A physical media is yours, and you may do with it what you please. DRM and Terms of Service invite unnecessary restrictions that only antagonize the user, not as if there isn't enough of it on physical media with region-locking.

Also, the more digital something gets, the more it depends on the distributor, and cramming all that responsibility onto one party can be trouble in the long run. Music files are one thing, digital audio isn't going anywhere and there are always converters. Games? That's a whole other can of worms. What's going to happen if games go all-digital and, next console generation, previous classics are taken off the servers? The games become completely impossible for a new user to obtain without resorting to piracy. This is to say nothing of the fact that, as a game library grows larger, you have only the provider's website and only the provider's search engine at your disposal to make a purchase. How many people honestly consider that adequate? Who here DOESN'T look for Virtual Console lists on a webpage rather than browsing the actual clumsy store?

With a physical media, distribution remains on some lesser scale through the used market regardless of whether or not the publisher remains involved, and the involvement of multiple distributors, be they of new or used games, allows the consumer to find the level of service they want.

Digital distribution is a wonderful add-on to the market, but it is and should remain, an alternative and/or supplement, not a replacement.

[osgeld]

Its not only DRM and TOS, its the fact that when a company decides you should not have a game anymore, tough luck

I dont like being told what to do with my property (eg my tiger woods for palm, I cant play it eventho I still own a valid license ... I payed EA 30 bucks to burn my money and this was 10 years ago)

[ComixSans]

Disorganized clutter? Some people actually like having game boxes lying on the shelf. I prefer solid media as opposed to data being kept somewhere.

Also, as a flashcart user you don't want to go back to switching carts? Its nice to see that piracy has made your life easier.

I'm happy to pay for games i do oftern.. however yes flashcarts have made my life a lot easyer. The moment i got i dsi, along with a flash cart, i bought dsi points as i hoped (like alot of people) that they was going to release some decesn't dsi ware games, but no..

i use my flash cart with all the games i have legitimately.. in fact i think I've even thrown out carts I've had lying about, of games i still play like Mario Kart. and yes some people clearly do like having boxes lying about, but they are more and more the minority.. i know plenty of people with huge collections of music CD's they have packed up in storage unwilling to get read of them purely because they spend so much money collecting them in the first place.

Keep cart for the people who want them, like you can still buy music cd's. However recognize that the future is downloads and start making as many full games as you can down-loadable.

[ComixSans]

would also add the mistake the music industry made was not recognizing for a long time that people wanted downloads and failed to give a legitimate means to do so.

[osgeld]

I dunno if you were a significant buyer back in the early days of music downloads but ...

back then one would hear a new single and then be forced to wait 3-9 months before the 20$ cd would come out (which was slightly less than half of an 80 hour game) for 2 more good tracks and maybe 15 min of entertainment, it was a HUGE deal to be able to pick n choose your own tracks

At one point I had a music collection in my car on cd audio format that was over 5 inches thick, but in all honestly it would last me a couple hours in good tracks

Flash forward 10 years the video game industry is trying to force the same principal but theres a big difference

you cant pick and choose the best parts of a game for 99 cents per 5 min, and theres all of a sudden a false impression that we want to spend 4 nights downloading a game we honestly would not take a crap on for full price and no local copy

its just easier to goto xstop and buy a damn disk, that way when we run out of memory for the 4 gig game of choice we dont have to go and re download it

you should have seen my wife in tears over the direct download (its all friggen digital no matter the medium so I REFUSE to call it digital distribution) version of the SIMS 3

it took us 2 days on 3mb dsl, and eventho she preordered it she didnt have it until 2 days after any yutz that bought it at walmart , without reservation, on the day of release

then OMG when she wanted to re-install it cause the garbage was screwing up, EA said, well heres 5.8gb for you to RE DOWNLOAD wait 2 days

luckily I smelled trouble and made a copy of the download before the EA installer canned it

Its a royal PITA that requires special installers that don't work right for HUGE downloads and if you dare screw up your f-ed

Most of my wifes Sims 2 stuff ive archived on dvd-r, and less than 2 years later its not available for download

2 years and your game is worthless

I have 5.25 disk games like wing commander II that are darn near 20 years old, and dammit if I want to play it, its MY choice

not some publisher that may or may not be in business

Ive been gaming since the Atari 2600, and I own my original Colecovision, I dont trust a developer further than their most recent title, and I dont want my money flushed down the john cause RADGAMES or whatever cant pay a 3.99 a month web server

[dcdood]

in my opinion, Digital Distribution is just going to be a handout to hackers to the point where you cant tell a bittorrent site from the PS Store.

Also in some cases, Wireless internet isn't available in all homes, and even in more rare cases there are homes w/o internet or w/o broadband and how can they get games, well if there is sole DD then they cant and thats a waste of money
--
there are some good things about DD though: like size isn't limited to media, like with my PC which has a 720GB HDD, compared to an Playstation 3 Game which at the most can be 50GB
-
but please keep physical media alive and kicking!

[fpcreator2000]

I dunno if you were a significant buyer back in the early days of music downloads but ...

back then one would hear a new single and then be forced to wait 3-9 months before the 20$ cd would come out (which was slightly less than half of an 80 hour game) for 2 more good tracks and maybe 15 min of entertainment, it was a HUGE deal to be able to pick n choose your own tracks

At one point I had a music collection in my car on cd audio format that was over 5 inches thick, but in all honestly it would last me a couple hours in good tracks

Flash forward 10 years the video game industry is trying to force the same principal but theres a big difference

you cant pick and choose the best parts of a game for 99 cents per 5 min, and theres all of a sudden a false impression that we want to spend 4 nights downloading a game we honestly would not take a crap on for full price and no local copy

its just easier to goto xstop and buy a damn disk, that way when we run out of memory for the 4 gig game of choice we dont have to go and re download it

you should have seen my wife in tears over the direct download (its all friggen digital no matter the medium so I REFUSE to call it digital distribution) version of the SIMS 3

it took us 2 days on 3mb dsl, and eventho she preordered it she didnt have it until 2 days after any yutz that bought it at walmart , without reservation, on the day of release

then OMG when she wanted to re-install it cause the garbage was screwing up, EA said, well heres 5.8gb for you to RE DOWNLOAD wait 2 days

luckily I smelled trouble and made a copy of the download before the EA installer canned it

Its a royal PITA that requires special installers that don't work right for HUGE downloads and if you dare screw up your f-ed

Most of my wifes Sims 2 stuff ive archived on dvd-r, and less than 2 years later its not available for download

2 years and your game is worthless

I have 5.25 disk games like wing commander II that are darn near 20 years old, and dammit if I want to play it, its MY choice

not some publisher that may or may not be in business

Ive been gaming since the Atari 2600, and I own my original Colecovision, I dont trust a developer further than their most recent title, and I dont want my money flushed down the john cause RADGAMES or whatever cant pay a 3.99 a month web server

Hence the reason I will never again purchase a product from Valve as long as they use STEAM. I wanted to play Half Life 2 in NYC over my grandmother's during the Christmas holiday. I couldn't because I had to connect to the internet to play a game I paid money for and installed at my house using internet access to verify the installation. I tried to sell it, but most stores don't take computer games so now it's collecting dust. I can respect DRM, but what Valve does with STEAM is overkill, specially since I was not playing the game online.

A good DRM strategy would be to sell games with a hardware piece were a piece of code from the game is included (usb maybe), and is unique for every game. Game runs hardware is detected by the game.

Of course, as Amazon has shown with their Kindle, they can remove content at a whim (refunding you back in useless points because it's not cash in the case of XBOX Live).

As a game collector, I prefer physical media.

[mmochel]

I agree with most of the posters here.
DD is a bad idea because the distributor will ultimatly make it so that you have no rights to the game that you legitimatly purchased.

I have been collecting games for 15 years now and I own hundreds of them. There is only so much memory on a system or pc. So I would be forced to delete games to make room for new ones.

On top of that is the point that was made before that some publishers make it nearly impossible to actually play the games that you have paid for. Things like steam and agressive DRM are what has all but killed off the PC game industry.

And my last point is that I like to see my game collection neatly organized on shelves. Knowing that I can go back and play anything from my collection from pong to halo.

[Basil Zero]

Gotta agree with Shigeru on this as well.

I hope games wont be digital only, cause I for one would like solid media as well, plus putting your credit number on line is a bit risky sometimes, you might as well go to the store and buy a game off the shelf, sure its time consuming, but imo, you really shouldnt have one choice, should have 2 choices.