Email: “Are Video Games Dead?”

Hello Malstrom!

I watched the video on your recent post on “Are Video Games Dead”, and I became concerned particularly about the end of the video: all of these ‘industry insiders’ are doing nothing but praising digital distribution, favouring their emergence as a mainstay. What particularly galled me was the statement that in a few years, searching for a game at retail will be like searching for vinyl at a record store: it just won’t be found.

You have been regularly stating how digital distribution is nothing but a renting system where you never really own the game – but is it even possible for something like the above to happen? Because I can in all honestly envision such a future, and I have a real fear that, in a couple years, I won’t be able to own a game myself. That feeling of holding a new game with my own two hands – the cover, the box art, everything about a physical hard copy of the game is superior in my mind to digital distribution, but with ‘industry people’ saying not only that digital distribution is the future (they’ve been saying that for a while) but actually praising it as the ‘second coming’ got me worried. Now I do use Steam to buy some games – Indie games, PC superior-games like Left4Dead, or what have you. But I’d never buy, for example, Street Fighter IV or Beyond Good and Evil or Professor Layton or Little King’s Story on it. I’d never buy a game I really enjoy and want to play again in the future, digitally. I need to own it! Have these developers become so far gone they refuse to acknowledge the desires of their own customers?

I say this because I don’t think I’m alone in this! It’s not just a black and white system, where simply because these companies are losing money and Steam is working and making Valve money everyone should go to digitial distribution.

Is it possible that this push for digital distribution is just an excuse for these publishers who bet on the PS360 Goliath and lost to David’s Wii? They’re losing money, and so in an attempt to stem costs and save themselves and their investors their profit margin, they want digital distribution to get rid of all the extra retail costs and ‘focus on the game’. Not that it will ensure quality, but at least they’ll make more of a profit (theoretically)?

I am seriously hoping that this is the case, and I sincerely wanted to know your opinion on the matter. I simply cannot fathom why they praise digital distribution so much! All logic points to it being a bad idea, but I fear the day it is implemented…

Instead of “Gaming as Movement”, we have “Gaming as Industry”.

“Gaming as Movement” is making the customers the priority. It is about spreading gaming, about fighting disinterest, exploring new gaming, and profits prosper because customers prosper.

“Gaming as Industry” is making the profits the priority. It is about milking gaming, about re-invigorating ‘franchises’, exploring new business models, and profits prosper because the same customers are creating more revenue.

If sales are down, a “Gaming as Movement” response would be: “We need to make more customers, and satisfy the customers we do have.” Nintendo would make this type of response. A “Gaming as Industry” response would be: “We need to make up the loss of profit somewhere else. We need new business models. If we cut out retail through “digital distribution”, those profits would be made up.”

This is why you never heard anyone in that video talk about ‘customers’. It is a false belief that business is about making money. It is really about making customers. Money doesn’t fall from the sky, it comes from customers.

The famous Nintendo gifs of the DS and Wii of it saying: “It prints money!” should be redone for them to say: “It creates customers!” That is the central reason why they were successful.

I think it is time we seperate the “Games Industry” from gaming as we keep talking about the two as if they were one of the same. They aren’t. The “Games Industry” has lost touch of its customers long ago. At this point, the best thing for gaming would be for the “Games Industry” to die. What would replace it would be a “Games Movement” where game companies would focus on making customers instead of stretching out their profits to cover the run-away costs of their hardcore gaming.

Don’t worry if they say ‘digital distribution’ being the future. These Technocrats think they decide what the future of the “industry” will be. Well, they don’t. Customers are what shapes an industry. Customers aren’t going to go along with it.

These are the same clowns who, a few years ago, proclaimed that this would be the High Definition Generation because “all TVs sold are now HD” and that if you don’t like HD gaming, you are ‘behind’ the times. And look what happened there! The customers clearly didn’t agree. Even the HD consoles aren’t being used in HD for many of them.

I also think these guys are falling for their own marketing. Someone who played video games all the time, who talked about video games, who breathed video games, was called a nerd and rightfully so. Unless it is your job, carving your life to be just about video-games is extremely nerdy.

To get around the ‘nerd stigma’, game companies began marketing it as ‘hardcore’. So now the nerd is no longer a nerd, the nerd is now ‘hardcore gamer’. This marketing was used so the little nerds wouldn’t feel guilty and would keep buying many games.

If you have noticed, everything that is considered ‘cool’ is something where you pay tons of money. A ‘cool car’ costs way more than the ‘regular’ car. ‘Cool clothes’, ‘cool clubs’, ‘cool restaurants’, and so on and so on. Most of the time, they aren’t cool because of quality so much as they are cool because their marketing department says so. All the things in life that are not ‘cool’ are things that don’t have a huge marketing department behind it.

It is as if the game companies have fallen for their own marketing. They now actually believe the so-called ‘hardcore gamer’ will really do whatever it is to play and buy the latest game. They think they can go the ‘digital distribution’ route because they believe hardcore gamers will buy the game regardless.

They are wrong. Hardcore gamers, which are actually nerdy gamers, do have a breaking point. They aren’t going to pay much for a game they will never own. And we still haven’t gotten to the backlash that will come over current digital distribution when everyone realizes all the software they bought on current systems is now obsolete in the upcoming generation (i.e. your Virtual Games cannot be played on the new system).

If they make a process of true digital distribution where you can buy a game and burn it to your own disc, as a back up copy in case the company blows up and their servers shut down, then digital distribution might hold a slight chance of working.

Consumers will not give up ownership of their games. There are more people who agree with your email than you think.