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NPD's Frazier: Consumers Prefer Retail
Game companies are making increased investments on digital download strategies, but a report from leading market research firm NPD Group finds that gamers still prefer brick-and-mortar retail.
According to NPD analyst Anita Frazier, who presented at this week's DICE Summit in Las Vegas, some 75 percent of game players say they prefer a boxed product, and 58 percent had never downloaded a game.
But out of those who have downloaded a game, 77 percent said it was just as good as a retail box.
Also, 65 percent of surveyed game players said they would be more likely to purchase a digital product if it were 10 percent less than retail.
Directly selling games to gamers could cut retailers out of the business equation. But leading specialty games retailer GameStop has said it doesn't expect full-blown digital distribution for another 10 to 15 years. Meanwhile, proponents of digital distribution within the games industry say it's happen much more rapidly than that.
Physical retailers aren't completely ignoring the online distribution trend. For example, in 2006, GameStop introduced the "Download Now" section on its website, which allows gamers to download catalog and new PC titles.
Mary Jane Irwin contributed to this report.
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Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
England and Wales company registration number 2008885
with stores going bankurpt or reducing shelf space in a ression or deppression this will more than help make profits for pc gaming.
When it comes to full price games, a boxed copy still offers more value. You can sell it, you can give it to a friend over the weekend and you need no online authentication to run it. Except for some PC titles maybe.
I would not want to download a 25Gigabyte game. First of all it would be ME paying for the physical memory, since console HDD are notoriously small. Secondly, the transfer speed of the distributor will be agonizingly bad. I got 20Mbit cable, yet neither Sony, nor any PC publisher really makes use of that, they all cap the speed at 8Mbit. My ISP can deliver digital purchases at 20Mbit to me, it's the publishers' end which is the bottle neck. Finally, the ability to patch at any time will only lead to lazy QA and launches being more of an open beta people pay full price for.
I prefer hard copies but I do own some digital content. I'd like to say that digital content should be cheaper. Yes there are server costs but, thanks to patching, that exists for retail content too. Plus they've cut out all the middle men, the shipping, paying for shelf space, etc.
People are definitely within reason to ask for digital content to be cheaper.
10 - 15 years is a LONG time. If people are talking about BD already being dead when those would be ~25gb to download, a 5gb game download is nothing.
I think they are just trying to keep the stock price up. I wouldn't say Gamestop is doomed or anything, but they will have to close a lot of those stores in the next three or four years, I think.
Brian
www.brianwoods.com
Longtime lurker, first time poster.
I for one prefer hard copies. I've recently had a terrible time with 360 DLC I legitimately bought but couldn't use due to DRM (I used my mate's 360 with my Live account and HDD as I can't get Live in my apartment). I'd hate to see that situation with full games meaning you could no longer borrow titles from friends.
well i dun think DD's would be our main means for getting games and such for the simple fact that game sizes are increasing like every month especially on the ps3. We would need like 400-500+ gig HD to fit our entire library of games. I kno some people say you can just delete and redownload but could u imagine redownloading games that are like 15-30gigs. Most pople are not blessed with Campus Connection that downloads like 3mb/s. it'll become annoying
I prefer hard copies of stuff I buy. None of that DRM applies in most cases.
I move around from country to country so often that I simply must have more than half of my games and media digital.
I am definitely in the 25% that do not prefer a boxed product. I can't wait to get rid of stacks and stacks of boxes and discs.
just like Ndp has a good track record about pc DD these days. Gamers prefer long term games such mmo dlc expasions.
Even Ea has said there is whole countries that depend on DD to buy their games. I wonder do they even track that?