Sony: 90% Of Game Sales Online In 10 Years
You may not have noticed, but this new generation has seen the emergence of game media being offered online, in the form of both playable demos and full downloadable titles (Warhawk, for example). Well, some have been wondering if we can expect to see more online game sales in the future, and as far as one Sony exec is concerned, the answer is a definite "yes."
According to That Video Game Blog, SCE UK's Ray Maguire speculated that within the next 10 years, "90% of game sales will be online." He said as much during his speech at the ELSPA press conference, and it's bound to spark some major debate.
“We have a situation that if you’re a retailer you’re currently responsible for the goods that come through your chain,” said Maguire. “But that’s not true with ISPs in the future. This isn’t merely a games industry issue. It’s an issue for every industry with companies that have a website, and when we look at user generated content it’s a people issue.”
Microsoft has long since believed that this would happen in the industry, and they even take it a step further. Sandy Duncan actually said that “dedicated games devices i.e. consoles (and handhelds) will die [out] in the next 5 to 10 years,” which seems completely incomprehensible to us right now. However, one never knows what the future may bring, and we often forget just how far the industry has come in 30 years. At this point, isn't anything possible?
4/11/2008 Ben Dutka
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Comments (12 posts)
screw_off
Saturday, April 12, 2008 @ 12:16:13 AM
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Affliction17
Saturday, April 12, 2008 @ 12:37:55 AM
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ThePoetRazel
Saturday, April 12, 2008 @ 3:00:10 AM
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With increasing Broadband speeds, increasing popularity of internet connectivity, larger HDDs and the technical modernization of many retail stores i can see this becoming a possibility. Instead of all those discs lying around taking up space, you just have a few external HDDs for storage. Wifi can probably handle the transport to a player.
And with the physical size of current memory sticks (16GB currently available) we may even have storage capacity for media on our credit cards one day. Entire sections of stores can be replaced with an atm style machine with slots for both your credit card and your memory card or a USB port for your external HDD.
Possibilities, possibilities.
Let's just see what the future brings.
Warukyure [Power User]
Saturday, April 12, 2008 @ 6:16:31 PM
DiminishedAngel
Saturday, April 12, 2008 @ 7:47:43 AM
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10 years ago broadband 56k modems were the standard.
I definitely see downloadable games composing a large portion of the overall market but I'm not sure HDD will be the standard within 10 years.
It's possible, and TB will almost certainly be the standard storage capacity like GBs are today, but game sizes are increasing at the same pace as HD technology. Putting Metal Gear Solid 4 on my PS3 would take almost the entire hard drive. My entire collection must be 100 TB of data.
Minishmaru
Saturday, April 12, 2008 @ 8:29:06 AM
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Ben Dutka PSXE [Administrator]
Saturday, April 12, 2008 @ 8:20:00 PM
bamf
Saturday, April 12, 2008 @ 4:20:19 PM
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I think with movies and games it is possible that you can 90% of sales through online retailers, thats what I'm doing and its cheaper.
With other products like clothes or groceries I think you need to actually see them in the shop and try clothes on.
PaiNT_kinG
Sunday, April 13, 2008 @ 12:42:49 AM
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p.s.i recently purchase warhawk and while its a great game,the limited account usage suck ass,oh and i hate multiplayer games with vertical split screen with no option to go horizontal cuz u have to do alot of turning to see the field

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Warukyure [Power User]
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Friday, April 11, 2008 @ 10:12:00 PM
Not to mention, the only way this will work is if games get shorter and shorter, a massive influx of indie games that are casual, simple, short, and worth only a few dollars, or creating games with a unified game engine in which all games will just be a layer that runs on top of it.
I think "REAL" games, will still exist on physical mediums, the Blu-Ray is still very new and in 10 years time, the 'PS4' would've only been out for maybe a year.
This model could also cause more problems such as
-server strains
-DRM
-whether we actually own the game or we can only download it a number of times
-Bandwidth limitations set by ISPs
-long Download times
-potential size of HDDs
Example:
I have around 300 (actually around 270~280) PS2 games. If those are all 1 disc each at around maybe 3.5 GB in size on average. That would mean: 300 X 3.5 GB = 1050 GB or 1.05 TB. Technically no *1* drive can store all that data.
Theoretically speaking:
Lets say someone has 100 games and by 2018 the average game size is 25GB (possibly due to the use of blu-ray as a medium in the past years).
Thats still 100 x 25GB or 2500GB/2.5TB.
Pray this doesn't model doesn't happen or we'll be shopping for new HDDs every time we want a game.