Miyamoto: Games will never be just digital

[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
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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
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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.