Boxed PC games market 'gone by 2011'

Frostmourne · 02 Feb 2010

Rubbish, although some retailers look surprised when I want a PC game.

Mass Effect 2? Platform? PC. Interesting. Pause. Sale complete.

I would never touch Steam. It wanted to update Fear 2 with what looked like a 2GB patch. And the patch can't be removed if it breaks the game. Forget. I'd choose a box and DRM anyday.

stew2 · 02 Feb 2010

Frostmourne said:

I would never touch Steam..

Exactly. I hate steam, the hassle i went through to be able to run Half Life 2 without needing steam on the pc was unbelievable. The HL2 games now load easily twice as fast and the same for loading screens when in the games.

Whenever i see a game that requires STEAM etc i now simply dont buy that game.

Who wants to go through this?

Launch game and wait for steam to load
wait for steam to apply updates to itself
wait for steam to apply updates to the game
receive message that you cant play your game now as STEAM servers are busy

No thanks.

Diosoth · 02 Feb 2010

I run cracked games with no CD patches. DRM is bad, nor do I need a CD in if it does a full install. PC gamers are giving up because they're being treated like criminals. This is the fault of the companies.

Billy · 02 Feb 2010

I prefere digital downloads. I get most my games via Direct2Drive, The Ea Store, and Steam in that order(I avoid steam when I can). Having a disc is nice but I seem to be buying over the internet more often than not.

Lebon14 · 02 Feb 2010

I understand the argument of Internet caps.
Here in the province of Quebec in Canada, we have probably the smallest caps you ever saw. Every extra GB you download is gonna cost you money.

Like, for my ISP, medium speed broadband (25$/month, 700kbps/700kbps (dl/up)), has a 2GB limit by month. On High Speed (45$/month, 7Mbps/850kbps) has a 30GB per month. The Extreme High-Speed (70$/month, my connection - 10Mbps/900kbps) has a 100GB per month.

Here are the extras $ you need to pay if you go over your cap :
For medium/high speed : 7.50$/GB, max 50$/month
Extreme high speed : 1.50$/GB, no limits (so, if you download/upped for 200GB, you gonna add 1.50$x100$ :\ )

So, people here are still heavily linked to their boxed content because of that. In the US, people has a 250GB cap and wine over it. For me, if I would have that, I would go crazy!

So, downloading 10 7GB digital games per month is really not for everybody. Even more if you format your computer and don't save much data each time...

OK, now that said, I'm not against digital video game services, in fact I like it. But, I would like to have an option, for exemple, for 10$ more, you have your digital download and a boxed version sent in the mail. Or, they could offer a good discount on the download but if you want it boxed, then, you will need to pay the original price (ex. 25$ for download version and 40$ for boxed version).

EvilOzzmess · 03 Feb 2010

Hogwash! It’s all to do with the game companies wanting to cut their costs, while keeping the game the exact same or an even steeper price, essentially ripping YOU off about 10%! That is why they are so giddy and excited about it, it’s just one more way to rip you off more!

Let me explain:

1) The cost of the actual DVD disk(s)
2) The design on the DVD disk(s)
3) The cost of the user guide/instructions
4) The cost of the encasement for the above
5) The cost of the printouts for the encasement

All roughly anywhere between an already grossly inflated $10 and $15 depending on X-number of disks, X-amount of plastic and X-amount of color ink/pages used to make the final product, plus markups on each material. So, by these factors you will be forced to pay the same price – if not more, for less and with the added inconvenience of NOT having a 100% sure-fire way to restore your game from a PHYSICAL MEDIUM should things go horribly wrong.

Sounds awesome… NOT! Who wants to give greedy companies MORE money for less, at your inconvenience? Not me, they already raise profits unfairly by well over $20 as it is! They do NOT need an extra $10 or more on top of that inflated $20, again at YOUR inconvenience!

However, if these companies guaranteed two conditions:

1) They LOWER the price by $10 to $15 to account for using NO materials AND 2) Allow you to BURN A PHYSICAL BACKUP DISK of the game - then hell yes, I’d say bring it on. BUT – we all know that will never happen. So… nope, not going there.

Once they pigeonhole everybody to this digital crap, I stop buying and playing new PC games - purely on principle!

valtonray · 03 Feb 2010

people have been ranting about the death of pc gaming forever, they will continue to sell boxed sets same as always. a few reasons for this are that pc gamers are more likely to buy collectors sets and special editions, a large portion of pc gamers worries what would happen if a company like steam went under, could they access their games still, the reassurance of an installable disc eases some of that and the market for pc gaming accessories is pretty good, you want them in the store making impulse buys, something that isn't likely to happen with online vendors.

Lordbob75 · 03 Feb 2010

Despite all the hate, there are some bonuses to steam:
1) All your games stay together on the program (i.e. you can redownload and run them on ANY computer you log into)
2) Settings across computers, change one thing on a desktop, your laptop gets updated
3) Dedicated servers (except for that one L4D one that crashes me everytime)
4) Your download is linked to your steam account, if you lose key/media, you can download it again and again. It is perma-linked to you.

Now, there are a lot of things I HATE too
1) Steam is glitchy, specifically on x64
2) Extra load times. I think they should link it in steam, but still let it run on its own
3) Breaks some games (EVE comes to mind)

So there are goods and bads.
For pricing, I agree, they will keep regular pricing because it costs them less (nothing actually, minus storage and bandwidth) to give you a download, so markup is like 95%.
They have the opportunity to make people really happy and HALVE prices, with the benefit of not wasting material...

We will see...

~Lordbob

valtonray · 03 Feb 2010

Diosoth said:

I run cracked games with no CD patches. DRM is bad, nor do I need a CD in if it does a full install. PC gamers are giving up because they're being treated like criminals. This is the fault of the companies.

maybe we wouldn't need DRM and copy protection if you bought your media...

Lebon14 · 03 Feb 2010

Lordbob75 said:

Despite all the hate, there are some bonuses to steam:
1) All your games stay together on the program (i.e. you can redownload and run them on ANY computer you log into)
2) Settings across computers, change one thing on a desktop, your laptop gets updated
3) Dedicated servers (except for that one L4D one that crashes me everytime)
4) Your download is linked to your steam account, if you lose key/media, you can download it again and again. It is perma-linked to you.

Now, there are a lot of things I HATE too
1) Steam is glitchy, specifically on x64
2) Extra load times. I think they should link it in steam, but still let it run on its own
3) Breaks some games (EVE comes to mind)

Thumbs up for the pros here! That's why I like Steam (and bro do too :) )
As for the cons, I don't care about an extra loading time. The trick is to actually OPEN Steam before opening the game *sigh*
I cannot tell if it breaks some games or not because the only game I'm playing with Steam is Audiosurf. No experience here.
As for x64 glitching, I... don't know either. I'm on x86 and I didn'ts ee in bugs in the UI. Except that I would love Steam to open extra Windows by the store WITH THE DEFAULT BROWSER instead of opening it with IE.

Anyway. Also, I just wish it had less update... I don't seem to be able to disable updates for Steam itself.