How much extra would you pay for digital download?

Mr.Nick said:
Agreed, perhaps it's something to do with the cost of the serial codes for the games, just a thought.
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Actually I think you'll find its more to do with having to provide a game with 100% storage and bandwidth

Say you make a game and make 1 DVD hard copy, that is 1 DVD, case and manual. Then add on the cost of shipping & shelf space until it sells. That is the end of the costs for you. You can figure out exactly how many copies you need to sell to figure when you start making a profit

Now, the digital version requires that you take a copy of the game, host it for an unlimited period of and provide a potentially unlimited number of downloads. The problem here is that because you have no idea how many you are going to sell or how many times your customers will download it you can't calculate bandwidth cost, and because if you even sell one copy you need to host it indefinitely you can't calculate storage costs.

This means that they have to charge more and to charge it for a lot longer in order to make enough profit for the system to survive.

I hope that makes sense, a moment of clarity in a very long and drunk day :D
 
AHarvey said:
Actually I think you'll find its more to do with having to provide a game with 100% storage and bandwidth

Say you make a game and make 1 DVD hard copy, that is 1 DVD, case and manual. Then add on the cost of shipping & shelf space until it sells. That is the end of the costs for you. You can figure out exactly how many copies you need to sell to figure when you start making a profit

Now, the digital version requires that you take a copy of the game, host it for an unlimited period of and provide a potentially unlimited number of downloads. The problem here is that because you have no idea how many you are going to sell or how many times your customers will download it you can't calculate bandwidth cost, and because if you even sell one copy you need to host it indefinitely you can't calculate storage costs.

This means that they have to charge more and to charge it for a lot longer in order to make enough profit for the system to survive.

I hope that makes sense, a moment of clarity in a very long and drunk day :D
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or you could do the whole wow etc model and go for peer to peer option. have it hosted but use a client to install that also acts like a p2p client. this should reduce your bandwidth overheads by quite a bit.
 
AHarvey said:
Now, the digital version requires that you take a copy of the game, host it for an unlimited period of and provide a potentially unlimited number of downloads. The problem here is that because you have no idea how many you are going to sell or how many times your customers will download it you can't calculate bandwidth cost, and because if you even sell one copy you need to host it indefinitely you can't calculate storage costs.

This means that they have to charge more and to charge it for a lot longer in order to make enough profit for the system to survive.

I hope that makes sense, a moment of clarity in a very long and drunk day :D
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It doesn't make sense because they can calculate it just as well as retail sales if not better because they can track how all of their users behave to further improve their data.

Download sales net the publisher the full value of the game, not the price they sell it to retails stores for so they're making extra money. Digital distribution is a lot cheaper and more profitable than physical sales unit for unit.
 
Digital games were originally sold to me as being a cheaper alternative and that's still the way I see it. But because games in digital download format always cost more than retail copies (if available), I tend to never buy digital versions. I still expect them to be cheaper than retail and I certainly wouldn't pay extra. The only exception to this are games that are only available in digital format and I still wouldn't pay a full game price (50€) for such a game. I really wanted Blood Bowl but I refused to buy it at 50€ so I more or less used an illegal proxy trick to buy it with $USD instead. That's how far I go to not pay the ridiculous digital game price.

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The problem with p2p distribution is that in many cases it still completely kills your connection because it uses your whole upload bandwidth, killing download bandwidth completely. Even company like Blizzard, who actually use torrents, have not put an upload limiter into their downloader so I can't use it. Then there's the port issue which is another huge problem with Blizzard's solution. Even if I restrict my upload through a 3rd party methods, I'm still not getting anything in because their system also lacks port control and I simply can't connect to anyone.

I'm not very confident Blizzard's new battle.net is going to solve these issues either - which is why I hate them disabling LAN in SC2 because there's no way in hell Internet connections with NAT and other stuff causing even more problems can actually take 20-30 people into battle.net using the same connection. Now LAN could easily take care of all that..

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But to original question, I want a discount before I go digital download over retail. And the discount needs to be big enough to take it below the cheapest retail price in western Europe because otherwise I'll just go for the retail with shipping. 50% off of new releases (50€/2=25€) in Steam BEFORE the release date and I might consider Steam. Even then, I might still find a cheaper retail alternative.
 
I prefer not to go with digital downloads.

At the end of the day, the games I have on my shelf are my games, and nobody can take them away from me, with the exception of breaking in! :p

With digital stuff, the be all the end all is the company on the other end. At any point, Valve or EA can decide that they simply don't like you and just nuke all your games, so you've lost all your money.

Oh, and they don't need a reason to do it either, the EULA covers them in that respect.

Now I know it's unusual that they do it for no reason but I don't like the possibility being there.

At the moment, I have Steam installed. But only in order to play HL2 and L4D, which "force" it upon you. Otherwise I wouldn't bother.

So sorry, for me a physical copy would always be preferable over a digital one, even if it actually means spending more!
 
AHarvey said:
And another reason I am always a little worried about systems like steam....what if they go bust?
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This has been brought up in a jillion Digital/Retail threads previously. Steam have implicitly stated that if hell freezes over and they go bust, they'll release a patch that permanently authorizes the client, allowing you to continue playing your games.
 
uv said:
This has been brought up in a jillion Digital/Retail threads previously. Steam have implicitly stated that if hell freezes over and they go bust, they'll release a patch that permanently authorizes the client, allowing you to continue playing your games.
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Yeah its not like when the lights are being turned off on them they would have any problem getting programmers to write a patch to unlock every game ............
 
I love Steam, I want everything on Steam. I'm only fussed about the box if it's a Games for Windows game - they look good alongside my 360 games. :D

But I would NEVER pay extra. It should be cheaper! If it's cheaper in the store, that's what I go for.
 
I wouldnt, I would expect it to be less, otherwise, why would i bother? If its even a few pence more expensive than the two big online retailers I'll wait the extra couple of hours for them to deliver it to my door than it takes to download.
 
uv said:
This has been brought up in a jillion Digital/Retail threads previously. Steam have implicitly stated that if hell freezes over and they go bust, they'll release a patch that permanently authorizes the client, allowing you to continue playing your games.
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Right so say this happens then your computer crashes and you lose everything on your hard drive, where are you going to redownload the games from if steam isn't hosting them anymore?

I personally hate steam, I refuse to pay for for less. If changing CDs is such a problem for you, use a no-cd crack
 
thecremeegg said:
Right so say this happens then your computer crashes and you lose everything on your hard drive, where are you going to redownload the games from if steam isn't hosting them anymore?

I personally hate steam, I refuse to pay for for less. If changing CDs is such a problem for you, use a no-cd crack
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Valve aren't the only content server providers and if such a thing happened there'd be loads more alternatives. But since it's not going to happen anyway.....
 
If the price is the same or lower (for a game I dont REALLY want) on steam i'll buy it.


Its quite rare that I buy games, because no matter how good steam is (and I was loving it when most were hating it :p) im not paying extra for it.
 
AcidHell2 said:
A pitance compared to traditional retail.

Reason it costs more, is it a niche market. Mp3s where the same, now it's mass market they are generally cheaper than he physical cd.
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Bandwidth and storage costs are immense when you get to a big enough scale, not to mention its an ongoing cost.
 
I'm in the I'll buy boxed if cheaper or same price camp.

I bought Race07 Evo this way and the patches appear to install like any other Steam game.

I should also add that on my bit of damp ADSL string it certainly takes a lot longer to download and install from Steam than a physical disk takes.
 
thecremeegg said:
Right so say this happens then your computer crashes and you lose everything on your hard drive, where are you going to redownload the games from if steam isn't hosting them anymore?

I personally hate steam, I refuse to pay for for less. If changing CDs is such a problem for you, use a no-cd crack
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That's not really much different to if you snapped your CD 10 years down the line though is it?

Say System Shock 2 or something for example, if your CD got scratched now, you'd have a tough time replacing it.
 
box product...less hassle...

but surely the point of digital distribution was meant to provide lower unit cost to the end user.. infact its not, its often more expensive than the boxed...

thats a joke!
 
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