Nintendo, again, says that they are not interested in hurting the retailer model unlike the “Game Industry” in general. This is true. Nintendo has no interest in harming the retail model.
Nintendo’s downloadable services are to be little more than to treat us as guinea pigs to their ‘experiments in gameplay’. While it is true that these experiments could not be done in retail, I suspect now that it has nothing to do with the costs so much as it has to do with customers being able to return turkeys. Most of WiiWare I bought I would return to the store if I could. The service is filled with turkeys. And once you buy it, you are stuck with it. I can’t even GIVE AWAY my turkeys like you could with games like Superman 64.
Nintendo’s reason for not wanting to overturn the retail model has nothing to do with disruption or trying to dismantle the “Game Industry”. It has everything to do with Nintendo being a hardware company. How can Nintendo put out a new controller if games are sold only through the Internet?
There is a notion in the “Game Industry” that video games are digital. This is false and demonstratively so. Games are programs for hardware. They are not programs themselves that exist in a magical ‘cloud’. Unlike software applications, a game is shaped and molded by its hardware.
Games are a hardware medium, not a software one. When the software leaves that hardware, it rarely performs as well. This is why collectors exist in the first place. They want to use the software on the original hardware because that is the optimum experience of that software. This is contrary to computer applications. No one wants to use Wordperfect of the 80s when they can use Word or Open Office today.
The history of gaming is the history of hardware. Arcades are primarily a hardware experience. Each machine was different with different controls. The first consoles were hardware primarily without the ability to change software.
Progress in gaming occurs with progress of the hardware. Aside from faster hardware putting out prettier graphics, sweeter sound, and larger games, where would gaming be without the mouse? Where would gaming be without the joystick or the the D-pad or the analog controller?
This generation, alone, we have seen the massive impact of new hardware in the form of the Touch Screen and the Motion Controller. I guarantee you that future changes in gaming will be due to this new hardware as well. The pattern of the past reveals to us the future.
Those who talk of games as purely software entities do not understand games. And this includes the “Game Industry” and even developers who are clamoring for ‘digital distribution’ because ‘games are digital anyway’. They aren’t. They are physical. It is the feel of the game that matters. And customers ‘feel’ the game only through the hardware, be it the touch screen on the DS or iPhone, through the mouse and keyboard of the PC, or through the controllers on the consoles.
Perhaps I should be in big support of ‘digital distribution’. The “Game Industry” couldn’t die any faster once it is implemented.