Is ‘Games on Demand’ Microsofts Way of Fighting 2nd Hand Sales?
Author: Vince | Date: June 4, 2009
Microsoft will launch their ‘Games on Demand’ service for the Xbox 360 this August which will allow users to download full retail titles directly to their Xbox 360. There has been a few games announced for the launch, Lego Star Wars, BioShock, Assassin’s Creed, Mass Effect, Sonic the Hedgehog, Oblivion, Crackdown, Colin McRae DiRT and Call of Duty 2, all of which will be available at a price comparative to their RRP (approx $20).
The thing that grabs me about that list is that all those games will be well over a year old when ‘Games on Demand’ launches and to pick up those quality titles second hand would still cost you around the same price, but you will actually have to leave your house to get it.
Personally, I think this is a move by Microsoft to try and reduce second hand game sales and claim back some of the money they and the game developers are missing out on, as the entire games industry has made their feelings on second hand game sales pretty well known over the last few years, especially as some of the big retail players are moving into that market. So digital distribution of games at a reasonable price seems like the ideal way to combat that, right?
What do you think? Let us know.
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I don’t think it will dent the 2nd hand market that badly, if at all.
I think £20 is too expensive to affect the market at all. Most of the games you have mentioned can be purchaced for under £15 brand new on Amazon and you can get a lot of them for under a tenner second hand on Amazon. I bet you could find them even cheaper in an actual shop.
The market I think it will affect is older games in supermarkets and other non traditional game retailers. They wont sell as many £20 games as they currently do and will probably reduce their range to just be the chart games.
Plus I bet you wouldn’t be able to play it on your new xbox after the old one red rings… Or take it round to your mates house and play it on their box… Or play it through back compatibility on the next gen xbox when it arrives. I would always choose a disk over digital download if I had the choice.
On the ’round your mates house’ bit, seems thats answered:-
“Secondly, once you purchase the game, you can go over to a buddy’s house and play it there too because Microsoft will store the license information on the Live servers.
“We keep the license information on the Live servers, so the user who purchased it can roam to another console and play the game there,” said Austin.”
Oh yes, I can see it now:
“Shall we play a bit of Halo 3? One moment please, we just need to download this 9GB file on your 2Mbps connection…”
Even a smallish game (5GB or half a DVD) will take an hour on an 8Mbps connection – and that’s provided Microsoft have enough bandwidth, your contention ratio is good, you’re not doing anything else online, the planets are aligned correctly, etc. etc.
Not wanting to knock the service as I still think it’s a good idea, but I think the whole “you can download it on a friend’s box” argument is a bit silly. You may as well just take your HDD round their house.
But the pricing was $20, not £20… So arguably about £15, and most of those games are still around £15-20 new in the shops and a minimum of £10 second hand, so it’s not really that bad.
It has been confirmed that you can delete and redownload them as many times as you like, athough I guess the normal DRM policy would apply, and it’s far too soon to be considering backwards compatibility for the next generation of consoles 5 years from now, hell you don’t even own one from this gen yet :p
“I would always choose a disk over digital download if I had the choice.” Truer words were never spoken, but with the iTunes generation it’s a different story.
I like downloading games. It’s quick, easy, and usually pretty cheap. Trouble is storage is never infinite and broadband speeds are never quick enough, so for full retail titles? Especially as they’re getting bigger and bigger all the time?
Nah.
Well you actually said its related to their RRP… most of the games in the list have an RRP of £20 (according to Amazon again) so arguably it will be £20 when it launches over here.
Fair point, $20 was the exapmle given and looking down that list on Amazon.com most of them are $20+ brand new, so hopefully we are looking at slightly discounted from RRP.