For some reason I was suddenly curious as to how much money I’d spent since last December on digital content for the 360, such as XBox Live Arcade titles and more recently Rock Band DLC. Of course you buy things in Microsoft Points on the 360, which like Wii Points and Disney Dollars are designed precisely to disguise how much money you’re actually spending. The PSN has my respect in this regard for taking the brave step of actually pricing things in units of real money. Quite why Microsoft and Nintendo chose to go against the precendent set by every other marketplace in the developed world (except Disneyland, but that’s intentionally ‘wacky’) I’m not sure - I doubt we’d take most high street retailers very seriously if they required us to buy things in ‘Starbucks Bucks’ or ‘HMV Quatloos’.
Anyway, when I totalled it all up, I’ve chugged my way through 13,000 Microsoft Points in 9 months so far, which in the real world is £110.50, and judging by the dates, about half of that has been on Rock Band DLC, the rest being XBLA titles. I’ve spent more on digitally delivered content on my 360 than I have on boxed games (just software, excluding plastic peripherals) - some of that is because I received most of my boxed games as presents, and I picked up a back catalogue from eBay, but even so, I do think my own habits are a sign of how quickly digitally delivered content is becoming accepted.
Small purchases (micropayments is an often used term, although that usually refers to even smaller amounts) are just easy to mentally justify, even if you end up making enough of them to exceed a larger pruchase that you would perhaps think about more carefully. It’s really easy to slap down £1.36 for a new Rock Band track (that’s less than 2 tubes of Pringles), or £6.80 for an XBLA title (Geometry Wars 2 is particularly a no-brainer); it really doesn’t take much to convince you, particularly when you know exactly what you’re getting - after all you can check out the Rock Band tracks on RockBandContent.com and play demos of every XBLA game before you buy.
Taking out the overhead of the retailer and physical distribution makes products cheaper - that’s obvious. Games are, in general, very overpriced - we pay £40 for a boxed game which required the same budget to make as a Hollywood blockbuster I can pick up across the aisle for a tenner. One obvious reason is that market is smaller, another reason is the silly situation we have where a console platform holder takes a huge slice of the pie just for letting developers deploy on their platform. All these things are interlinked - the audience is smaller partly because the content is so expensive, which leads to content marketed more at the core audience which spends that money, and larger margins required to make back console hardware development costs, etc etc. Nintendo has broken out of that to some degree, but they’ve mostly appealed just to the mass market, leaving most of the core audience on 360 and PS3. Ideally we’d have a situation where the whole spectrum of game players (’core’ and ‘mass market’ are the most talked about but there are lots of graduations) existed in one place, just like you have with movies, and obviously this is the holy grail that certainly MS and Sony are trying to chase, even though I have serious doubts that we’ll ever get there until the industry rids itself of the counterproductive market segmentation that multiple proprietary consoles creates. I do think that digital distribution helps though, because it disrupts the status quo, creates a more fluid situation that just can’t exist very easily elsewhere, and makes a space for people to experiment more - both as producers and consumers - and to see what works.
I’d love to know the bigger picture of how much money is spent on the likes of XBLA, Steam, PSN etc. I’m sure it’s generally smaller than retail sales, but I’d be interested in knowing the trajectory of those numbers, and in particular which kinds of players they are. Anecdotally I get the impression that digital distribution tends to be good for those ‘ex hardcore’ gamers like me - we don’t buy a ton of games anymore, but like quality bite-sized content and are willing to pay for it. We’re not casual, but we’re not hardcore anymore either.
Anyone else got interesting comparisons of their physical / digital purchase numbers?
September 23rd, 2008 at 8:57 pm
I don’t know the exact amounts, but on Rock Band I’ve probably spent $50 CDN, and then spent another $200 over the last 3 years on XBLA and other DLC such as expansion packs or new maps for games. Also some of that is my kids who “accidentally” spent about $50 on crappy Xbox Live Arcade games. My two boys are 6 and 3… now I keep my Xbox Live account locked with a code
September 23rd, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Funny, I was thinking about my CD collection sat on its once proud and tall wooden stack just the other day - its incredibly dusty, because I just don’t need em any more. Everything has been MP3-fied now, and I only ever buy albums or singles online as already mp3-ed zips.
Not to mention my games - I now have more games sat digitally in my Steam account and that crap EA store thingy, than I do boxes sat on my shelf (ok I had to clear loads away recently, but still).
Digital is the way to go, and I say they got Wall-E wrong - the future is going to be a very uncluttered place. Which is kinda sad ;(
September 23rd, 2008 at 9:33 pm
Well cross platform tools and tech like Ogre for example could help. Obviously in house tech EA uses for example must be cross platform to some degree, otherwise Burnout would only be on one platform. Though it seems on cross platform titles there’s always a “lead” and a second place.
I think competition is healthy, I would hate to think of a world without a Wii mixing it up and making the other platform holders think. Of course I would prefer my console of choice to sell loads and not be sold as a “not as powerful console” even though it has a better gpu for example and doesn’t require hd installs because it can actually read off the media at a decent speed… certain retail outlets and magazines seem to have a certain slant… but I’m not going to let myself go off on one about that
The Wii is a game changer, 360 brought a online gaming up a notch and the PS3 has hd media. Long may the different console creators force each other to innovate in their own ways.
The points I think (not sure) to insulate them from the money markets. You figure out the pre-paid cards are worth and ship a ton out at that rate I guess. Lawyers might say that the MS Points don’t actually have a monetary value (much like coupons I guess). That stuff is way over my head, just my take on it.
I think the future is digital distribution - I was in a Game the other day and they upsold a pre-owned copy for 5GBP less to some woman buying a present for her son - saying it was as good as new on a game that had only been out a week. Well… the developer isn’t going to see any of that sale are they?
Danger of evil is when games that don’t stand up on their own are sold and *require* you to spend those points on DLC IMHO.
September 24th, 2008 at 9:12 am
@Falagard: haha, so that’s why your profile features Barbie Horse Adventures…
@Paul Downey: Definitely. My CDs go in my PC once, then they’re shoved on a shelf to collect dust. I’d buy everything electronically if it wasn’t for the DRM being a pain the ass, and that I can get albums cheaper provided they’re not new releases.
@Paul Evans: ‘Innovation’ is often touted as the reason for the console wars, but I really don’t buy this. Every iteration the hardware becomes more similar; except for the Blu-Ray drive there’s very little to separate the gaming capabilities of the 360 and the PS3, as bourne out by all the ports looking pretty much identical. Sure the Wii has a nice controller, but it’s only a controller; there’s no reason that controller couldn’t be on any other console, and in many ways it would be better if it was, given how the Wii lineup has been pretty uninspiring.
Sure, the console approach lets people get access to new & sexy hardware cheaply - at least at first. But what I see is that the dividing lines between the consoles get blurrier every time, and ever more pointless. Why should I have to own all 3 consoles in order to play any game I want? That, plus the markup we pay on games to fund the hardware development, means that it’s really not cheaper in the long run. I can buy a Blu-Ray drive (for a PC) for less than the price difference between the 360 and the PS3, but for some reason I’m not allowed to do that, I have to buy a PS3 as well. It just creates a whole series of artificial market barriers that are just no good for consumers, and either more costly or restrictive for developers.
What the Wii *has* done though is prove that the hardware ‘race’ that the console manufacturers use as a reason for their being proprietary consoles is no longer applicable. Nintendo didn’t need to spend bazillions on coming up with a new device, they just used an old one, redesigned it a bit and concentrated on a peripheral, and people bought it by the truckload. The hardware arms race is over, or at least significantly undermined, and given that’s the case, I fail to see the need for developers and consumers to pay huge slices of money to a proprietary hardware maker for content. Content is what is important - it should not be beholden to the hardware owner, it should be the other way around. The whole market is skewed compared to every other content delivery system (like music, books and films - sure the CD inventors get a slice, but it’s tiny compared to the content creator) and I really see a need for change here. It’s going to happen anyway - the Wii and PS3 have together shattered the business case for doing major proprietary hardware dev in the future (PS3 will never make its money back for such a complex proprietary device, the Wii makes a bucketload with mostly cheap existing tech), and exclusives are becoming ever more rare because they make little financial sense to anyone except wholely owned subsidiaries of the hardware maker - it’s just a matter of time IMO.
September 24th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Just a little word concerning your comparison between movies and games:
I suppose it’s not quite correct to say “why are games so much more expensive, it works out with movies, too!”. First of all many of nowaday’s “Hollywood Blockbusters” are probably already payed for by hidden (or obvious) product placement before they even appear in any cinema. If the movie is a decent success the screenings alone will cover the production costs and after that the movie will be sold on DVDs or via other channels before the licences are finally sold of to TV stations worldwide for decades to come.
September 24th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
True, but there are equivalents in games too; whether it’s iPods in MGS or Dole bananas in Super Monkey Ball. Platinum collections and game rentals are also common, and XBox Live and Wii’s Virtual Console you can buy full copies of old games, and many people do. There are the exact same opportunities for games here as movies, it’s just that the industry has been so focussed on (expensive) retail console sales, much of it is niche right now. It doesn’t mean it can’t work.
September 24th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
> Sure the Wii has a nice controller, but it’s only a controller…
au contraire. Look past the plastic and it’s really the way you play, interact and experience the wii, so it’s much more than just a controller. It’s the reason why many, many people buy the wii. Sure, it may lose it’s charm after a bit, but it’s alluring non-the-less. I can’t tell you how many people at work, and relatives and visitors to my home have said they just had to get a wii after using the wiimote. The darn things just sell themselves.
September 24th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
I disagree - I used to think that the Wii was a whole package, but it’s really not, it’s a control system and a certain style of game design. 2 years ago Nintendo were the only ones making more playful / intuitive games, but that’s really not the case anymore, and actually Nintendo haven’t been as innovative on it as the early promise suggested anyway.
The genius was in making the controller, popularising non-hardcore game style and pairing it with a machine that was cheap enough for everyone to impulse-buy. Those 3 things together are what Wii is, and it’s really nothing to do with the little white box, which is just a cheap vehicle using existing tech; it could easily have been an embedded Linux PC in that box and it wouldn’t have made any difference. It’s all about that controller and the game design - that’s what hooks people in. What I’m saying is that given the same controller and the same game design, Wii Sports, Wii Play and Super Mario Galaxy would work on absolutely any platform. If you could play Wii Sports by plugging a Wiimote into your DVD player, people would buy it by the bucketload too. What we’re missing right now is a universal gaming platform that scales at all levels, that’s why the Wii was needed as a platform rather than just a philosophy and controller. I’m looking forward to the day when a game platform can scale with content; cheap enough for the masses but capable enough for the hardcore, just like a DVD player. I don’t think we’re hugely far away from that, and how well the Wii sells is in a way a sign of that. People don’t care about hardware so much anymore, and that will only continue to dominate.
There’s a question about who could exploit that best of course, but I have to say Nintendo have delivered far less than I personally expected in 2006, despite making a shedload of cash. It’s almost like they started making so much money they’re happy just to sit back and make franchise repetitions now which make only simplistic use of the Wiimote. SMG was great, but since then, what have we had from Ninty beyond lazy Gamecube regurgitations?
September 24th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Bought the Spore Creature Creator for €5, probably fired it up 3 times for 15 minutes each. Terrible game, but it seemed nice at the time.