In theory I think digital distribution is a good idea. I'm pleased it's keeping the PC market alive. But I feel like the current incarnation exists through greed and developer convenience rather than actually offering something new and beneficial for me. I know I appear to be in the minority, but so far I've found the experience of buying, downloading and playing digital content to be a slow, cumbersome and frustrating experience and in the end I haven't found any benefit.

Like I say I have limited time to play games. I want to be blowing stuff up. I don't want to spend that time messing with steam or other clients which are too heavy and arrogant for their own good. They're slow, they hog resources and network traffic without my permission.. and they just get in my face. Was steam developed by norton?.. it behaves like it.

Most games will download faster than the time it takes you to drive to the store and buy them. Larger ones take longer, but there's still something to be said for the convenience of being able to sit on your butt and watch tv or going to do something more useful with your time while your game downloads and installs.

Most games will download faster than the time it takes you to drive to the store and buy them.

You missed the part of his post about quality broadband...
When I lived in Sydney, it would take 1.8 days of non-stop downloading to get a 10GB game, assuming the weather was good (I was on WiMAX...)

When I bought the physical version of HL2 (on 5 CDs), it still took 5 hours to install thanks to Steam forcing me to download extra data (I was on dial-up, which isn't even officially supported by that SINGLE PLAYER GAME).

Even today in a major metropolitan area where I get 1MByte/s downloads via steam, it's still ~3 hours to get a 10GB game. If I wanted some exercise, I could walk 1hr to the CBD, buy it, and walk back in less time.
Alternatively I can drop by the game store on my way home from work and then install it in 5 minutes.
But yes, I still do buy from steam for convenience, and sometimes for price

[quote name='way2lazy2care' timestamp='1305032709' post='4808935']Most games will download faster than the time it takes you to drive to the store and buy them.

You missed the part of his post about quality broadband...
When I lived in Sydney, it would take 1.8 days of non-stop downloading to get a 10GB game, assuming the weather was good (I was on WiMAX...)
[/quote]

I am aware of that, but most games over 10gb are also still available in stores despite not being in quantities they used to be. The benefit of having a distribution channel accessible to all developers and with a lower cost to consumers far outweighs the benefit of not having a good internet connection in 2011.

[quote name='Gorbstein' timestamp='1305026630' post='4808912']
In theory I think digital distribution is a good idea. I'm pleased it's keeping the PC market alive. But I feel like the current incarnation exists through greed and developer convenience rather than actually offering something new and beneficial for me. I know I appear to be in the minority, but so far I've found the experience of buying, downloading and playing digital content to be a slow, cumbersome and frustrating experience and in the end I haven't found any benefit.

Like I say I have limited time to play games. I want to be blowing stuff up. I don't want to spend that time messing with steam or other clients which are too heavy and arrogant for their own good. They're slow, they hog resources and network traffic without my permission.. and they just get in my face. Was steam developed by norton?.. it behaves like it.

Most games will download faster than the time it takes you to drive to the store and buy them. Larger ones take longer, but there's still something to be said for the convenience of being able to sit on your butt and watch tv or going to do something more useful with your time while your game downloads and installs.
[/quote]

a game has to be very large to take longer than a ~30 min trip to the store (including queueing and return trip), assuming a dowload speed of 6MByte / second (48Mbps) a game like Fallout new vegas (6819MB on steam) only takes around 19 minutes to download. While steam usually can't deliver those download rateson the release day of a popular game it is getting there on average (doing a test install of halflife 2 right now and its downloading at 4.5-7.5MB/second, total download time for a 5.2GB game ~12-20 minutes.

I have to be really fast to get to the store, buy the game and get back in that time, While games are getting larger consumer connections are getting faster (1Gbps connections are becoming available to joe average) and the digital download services are improving things on their side aswell.

In my opinion, the only edge that PCs ever had over consoles is that they were as powerful as you wanted them to be. You could always upgrade your PC to the latest technology if you wanted. I guess it was probably also a factor that consoles were less popular than PCs for a time, and more expensive to develop for since you needed to buy a dev kit and negotiate with the console makers to be able to distribute a game. So most customers and programmers had something to gain uniquely from PCs.

But now consoles are way more popular, and so they are more profitable to develop for. And their hardware is good enough that the advantage of a bleeding edge computer is less noticeable. Plus, with the relative market share so much higher for consoles now, there are far fewer experiences that you can only get on your computer, further reducing the incentive for a gamer to buy and maintain a PC at gaming quality. Not to mention the "it just works" factor of a console. You never have a graphics card driver issue with a PS3.

[size="1"]First they came for the trade-ins,
and I didn't speak out because I had my physical disks.

Then they came for the digital the physical disks,
and I didn't speak out because I had my digital copies.

Then they came for the digital copies,
and I didn't speak out because I had my cloud service.

Then they came for my cloud
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

I think that this is what Niemoller was really talking about.

[size="1"]First they came for the trade-ins,
and I didn't speak out because I had my physical disks.

Then they came for the digital the physical disks,
and I didn't speak out because I had my digital copies.

Then they came for the digital copies,
and I didn't speak out because I had my cloud service.

Then they came for my cloud
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

When I wrote my mini story this is what I was thinking of.

[color="#1C2837"] I used to have a physical copy, but I was fine with my digital copy, but when they said they'd store my digital copy for me on their server I drew the line. Who will stand with me!" and everyone will be like

[color="#1C2837"]I still prefer to buy physical games, but I do digital downloads from time to time. I don't get your argument about how cloud computing will start to seem tempting. It will never be tempting for me. The only reason it is being pushed as an alternative is so greedy corporate entities can finally have complete control over how end-users use their software.
[/quote]
Well you're assuming it's for greed. In reality it could cut costs by getting rid of the production of physical copies which become outdated before release. Also bandwidth in reality is very cheap and will continue to spiral to basically free in the future. (Though I think ISPs will hide that or purposely stop laying cable to keep supply low</paranoid>). There is a control thing, but on the other hand this means that companies won't offset prices because of piracy. This also means no wait times really between patches.

I honestly don't think people will be impressed until we see cloud exclusive games with like custom hardware or special techniques not available to consumers. Currently there's nothing really ground breaking. I mean I can download OnLive's 543 KB installer in less than a second on my work computer (that has no dedicated GPU) and jump into a game of Metro 2033 instantly. It's not impressive enough since most people can play that game on max nowadays (even my laptop can). There would be a big difference if I was booting into like an MMOFPS game with 10K players using a radically small 6.375 mbps (max bandwidth I could see while playing games just now) connection.

Kind of wish someone would set up the cloud system and put every single game (even the oldest DOS games) onto the system to play. That would impress me.

it would take 1.8 days of non-stop downloading to get a 10GB game [/quote]
I have a 10GB a month data limit & would you believe it that was more than most internet users in NZ

OK lots of ppl can download 100's GB data a month but theres a huge swath of the world that cant

Oh yeah, I forgot about data caps zeds. My "10GB would've taken 1.8 days" example should actually be 9.8 days when you take into account the throttling after my 4GB cap.... And that was the very best connection I could get in my central Sydney apartment...

The benefit of having a distribution channel accessible to all developers and with a lower cost to consumers far outweighs the benefit of not having a good internet connection in 2011.

I don't know what this means... It sounds like you're assuming that I'm arguing that digital distribution shouldn't exist?
I was just adding to Gorbstein's anecdotes about how painful DD can be for a percentage of it's customers, not arguing that it's the anti-christ.

When I wrote my mini story this is what I was thinking of.

Your NLP worked on me then

I don't know what this means... It sounds like you're assuming that I'm arguing that digital distribution shouldn't exist?
I was just adding to Gorbstein's anecdotes about how painful DD can be for a percentage of it's customers, not arguing that it's the anti-christ.

I am aware that it sucks for some users. Most of the games that would have been in physical stores years ago are still being released in boxes in those stores. There are just more games being released online that benefit more developers and customers who have decent internet connections.

What?