I hope you change your mind and create a box for the arcade documentary.

Consoles have the advantage of forcing you to one particular website. When I go online on my PS3, I’m directed to the PS3 store, where I can download demos and (I’m sure they hope) purchase games. The problem those other types of media you mentioned (books, movies and computer games) have is there is no one source to check for those things online. Books might be the closest with Amazon, but even that is not a forced, captive audience.

At least the videogame companies seem to realize that the “virtual” version of a game isn’t worth the same price as the boxed version of a game. iTunes at .99 cents a song isn’t that bad of a deal, but when you start talking about a 12-song album, what’s the incentive in going digital versus just buying the “real” thing?

And that’s one big difference — to my generation, the boxed copy equates to “real” while the virtual copy is somehow “less than that.” I think people expect a big discount when buying virtual products.

The other big difference between real and virtual is that throughout our entire lives we’ve been trained that whatever we bought was ours forever. There’s no lease on my Twisted Sister albums — as long as that vinyl remains scratch free, they’re mine forever. In virtual-land, it becomes trickier — especially when you throw DRM into the mix, and all of a sudden you have companies telling us what we can and can’t do with the things we’ve downloaded. I can’t take a DRM protected e-book to work and read it off my thumb drive. I can’t copy my DRM protected MP3s onto my MP3 player. But the biggest thing is, if I change computers (or buy a new PS3) I might not be able to get those “virtual” things back. I’ve lost them, and that’s not fair. I paid for them and I want to own them forever.

It’s more than just a technical issue; they’ll have to ease us into this one (and they’re doing it). Then again, I know people who got burned by divx the first time around and those people will never, ever trust e-delivered goods again. And I don’t blame them. They paid for that stuff, and now it’s gone because someone somewhere turned off the switch.

On a gaming forum I frequent I recently read a thread about people making DVD boxes to put on the shelf for the virtual Wii games they’ve downloaded. We’ve got a long way to go before everything moves to digital delivery — especially to “collectors” such as myself.

I’m not saying I won’t download Arcade in 2009-2010, but if I do, you can pretty much bet I’ll be making my own case cover so I can burn the movie and store it with my other “real” DVDs.

There is a game that was made by very talented people over the Internet a couple of years ago. This process almost never works, so that these guys (Shifting Suns) actually accomplished what they set out to do is pretty amazing. That the game they developed is really good is astounding. The game is a Bard’s Tale-style adventure called “Devil Whiskey.” They offered a boxed copy but boxes being what they are, the more frugal gamer probably chose direct download. I certainly did. It was my first exposure to direct downloading.

(An aside: pricing things out, boxes are like the most expensive part of a release, as nobody will talk to you unless you’re ready to print a thousand, at minimum. I think there’s a hole in the market that somebody should plug. But then, I’m biased, as I’m making text games for 200 old guys and Adam Thornton’s beard.)

The direct download of Devil Whiskey worked great, until it suddenly did not work great, in which case people were giving their money to the company that had abandoned the game and received no product. This made all their new customers angry. The last time I checked, their forum was not on-line, but when it was it was pretty much all rants by people who felt they got ripped off. Trying to write them about it had you encounter their spam traps, which inexplicably tell you to “Piss off.”

Additionally, the direct download software invalidated your account after a year, thus angering the people that were previously happy. I am personally of the belief that companies that offer direct downloads should allow indefinite downloads — a more reasonable person might say that, no, indefinite is too long a time, let’s cap it somewhere. I would hope that most people would agree that a year is too short. Shifting Suns tied patches to the account, so the early-adopters were not allowed to re-download their game, download or even look at patches after a year.

(When the developers abandoned the project, that ended anyone being able to re-activate your account. An amazing game has been sullied by the neglect of developers. And I can’t even blame them! They are coders, artists and musicians, not Publisher Guys. And it bears repeating that Devil Whiskey is one of the best games ever made.)

However, most of this would have been avoided (well, except the patch thing) if everyone just bought a boxed copy to begin with. This is just a single incident, but it ultimately drives people away from direct downloads and I think that this problem, more than bandwidth, needs to be solved before this is process is widely adopted.

Along the same lines: Steam works great in 2007, but there is a very small, very tiny portion of my mind dedicated to being in favor of the survival and prosperity of Steam, so I can continue to put Half-Life 2 on my computers, through upgrades and crashes. This creates a bit of a conflict of interest, in so much as video gamers are expected to have an adversarial relationship with game producers, i.e., this.

(Of course, to be totally honest, I simply like having the hard, physical media around. It is even extra-wonderful to surround yourself with the realized, creative ventures of your friends and those that you admire. If the Arcade Documentary DVD case came all lopsided like the game “Wacko” that would be the greatest thing ever, and just not something you can get out of a direct download. Er, unless the download dialogue box was lopsided, which would be stupid like so much Kosmic Krooz’r. Picking the right game in that franchise to be inspired from is critical.)

This is completely not true. I will grant you that in general they are
no longer the pretty packages they used to be, but records are still
produced and used around the world.

As to the boxes going away, I think the type and the style in which
things are packaged will continue to change, but I don’t believe that
packaging and physical products will be going away entirely any time
soon. At least, not for the majority of people.