Digital Distribution

With the rise of digital distribution certain questions begin to come to mind. Because the media is stored on a hard drive and no longer on physical media should the price reflect that? Since the media is stored digitally does the inclusion of Digital Rights Management (DRM) take away from the customers experience?

Honestly, these are all questions I have heard since digital distribution has gained more and more momentum. This is mostly because more and more companies are pushing for digital distribution. Only problem is most people have limited storage space available on their devices and moving towards digital distribution will be a problem.

First, let me get to the question of price. Currently, Xbox and Playstation customers are paying full price, $59.99, for digital copies of retail games. This has raised some eyebrows because with the lose of physically producing the disk, manual and box the cost of the game itself should be cheaper. Let alone the fact that you are using up your storage space to house the game instead of being able to change disks freely. Another factor to look at is that these systems only offer a specific amount storage and after time space is limited. Which means you will either be deleting a game or having to spend an unfair amount on additional storage.

That brings me to the second question about DRM. Digital Rights Management is another term for a license that allows you to run the game on your system. It prevents users from installing the same game on other machines due to the CD key having already been used. Most publishers believe that DRM will protect their games from being pirated and force people to actually purchase the game. However, if you look closely the horror stories that surround DRM and it saying that the CD key for the game someone just bought has been used. Going through customer support is even worse because most of the time they will deny customers new CD keys because they don’t believe they actually bought the game even with proof.

One should also note the debate that took place betweenMartin Edmonson of Ubisoft and Gabe Newell of Valve. Both Ubisoft and Valve are two major video game developers and publishers. Ubisoft believes in protecting their content with DRM, while Valve distributes their games digitally through their own service called Steam. Gabe points out that customers aren’t pirating games to get them for free, but instead because of the customers needs.

I actually have to agree with Gabe because with the current state of some video games I feel that I wasted $59.99. Most companies are just pumping out titles to keep revenue streams up and not caring about the content of the game itself. This is why people pirate their games and feel that if I am using my own storage space for a digital copy I should be allowed to spend less.