Download versus Disc

Would someone run down the pros and cons of downloading a game versus buying the cd or dvd.

Thank you,

Ray

I prefer having the disc.

1. My ISP is a bit flaky, and I don't want to have to rely on them.
2. I've heard of people having problems with Steam accounts.
3. I'm a careful person, and have never lost / damaged a CD/DVD.

Plus, you get the manual, tech-tree posters, etc.

Re being too lazy to shop; me too. I order my games off the net. Cheaper that way too - I just got Company of Heroes for £14.99 including delivery. Can't be bad.

Yeah, it was cheaper for me to buy Galciv2 in CD than to download it!

I prefer to have it on disc which ill rip into a cd image file and ill play the game off my hard drive in all its entierty. Optical drives are slow as fuck but its better to have a hard copy of something.

I have to give you that the $ - £ rate at the moment is bordering on 2 – 1 so it is a very good time to buy things in $’s for me. But I did notice even though this was happening Half Life when it first came out was more for me to download than what I could have got it off www.play.com for. My point was more on what happens if developers get rid of retail sales all together and just do things online. That will create a monopoly on there content thus giving them the power to charge what ever they see fit rather than making things competitive.

At the end of the day when the developers do use steam to distribute content, especially Valve then it takes away a lot of the costs involved in distributing the product so instead of having a similar price to what you have to pay via retail should I not have cost benefits for not getting a box, disk or instruction manual.

That monopoly is already in place, also in the conventional logistical chain. Only the last part (the retail shops) is a multi channel, but the rest of the chain is owned by the publishers. If you check out what ValvE is doing with Steam, you see a lot of (temporary and permanent) discounting going on.

You will find that the actual price they ask for games is not so much related to actual unit costs. The actual reproducing and logistical costs (including all the margins for all intermediate players) maximally only make up a fraction of the normal advisory prices. You can deduce this from the prices they ask for leftover stock. The majority of costs for a game are initial investment (development costs).

What makes this business as attractive as it is, is when a product is succesful and enough units are sold, the margins for the publishers are really insanely high because of the low production and logistic costs. Once all costs have been covered, and the game has arrived in the almost 100% zone, they still sell lots of copies (and they are sure to keep the point in time that the product sales have made up all initial investments from the consumers).

The consumer price is related to what is perceived as being the price that you can ask from consumers, what they are willing to pay for a specific product. This is the main reason why prices vary as they do in different economic zones. It is not the logistics or localisation costs. This is also why publishers have lots of titles in their portfolio. Many of those titles are bleeders, but the amount of bleeding is known upfront. The titles that are succesful more than make up for it (big time).

The main advantage of digital distribution is convenience in my opinion. In terms of availability (never sold out) and also instantaneous release of the product to everyone who was waiting for it (steam preloading). Only once consumers realize that they are being ripped off on a continuous basis, you will see prices of games actually starting to drop. Maybe it is not fair to call it "ripping off", it is just free market principles. Demand and supply, where supply is fully controlled by a couple of multinational publishers. It also explains why the business is still booming regardless of big software piracy problems.

BOOO! [/environmentalist]

Nice! [/Gears of War]

@OP: I'm still finding a balance of B&M vs. Online. I've purchased a few cheap games off Steam, expecially bargain bin games that aren't on shelves anymore, and I love the Xbox Live Arcade, but I still prefer buying new titles from stores.