Online Purchase

[Jonathan Blow]

I just bought Guild Wars online, instant-download, and was playing very quickly.

Though they could stand to streamline the purchasing mechanism quite a lot ... nobody tried to make me pre-order anything or buy insurance for the latest issue of EGM. That was very nice.

I'm starting to think that what PC gaming needs is a standardized version of this ... electronic equivalent of standardized retail boxes. Starforce and all that crap can just go to hell when you have no physical medium.

Sure, this is scary to publishers, but come on. You've got to take your platform in the direction where it has the natural advantage. PCs have a lot of storage -- great for downloading games and keeping them around.

[Backov]

You're just STARTING to think this? ;>

Hell, this is about 2 years overdue. One of the players currently in the market will sew it up at some point.. TG.Net has a good stance on it, but it's a damn hard row to hoe.. More likely something like Steam with DRM up the wazoo will win out, initially.

[tronnc]

Yeah you'd think a big brick and mortar store or website would try to set something like this. Life if EB or Best Buy or even Walmart setup a service like this.

But I guess its really up to the game publishers, this type of thing has been tried plenty of times, Yahoo has a service to download certain commercial games and play them, http://gamesondemand.yahoo.com/play
But its a matter of getting all the titles.

It's never caught on because people don't like the idea of not owning the game that can be installed on any system without dealing with a server. Also the fact that most services like this you couldn't get the game patches as the exe file was different, you had to wait for the service to release the compatible patch with your game. One of the reasons Steam is more tolerable is its from the actual game devolopers, so your never behind on patches and stuff.

[steve]

A lot of people have been buying MMOs online. I think Sony has been offering EQ expansions as downloads for a few years.

It makes a lot of sense for MMOs because they don't require any copy protection.

[mouselock]

Once again I'd like to promote my idea for a hardware secured USB dongle that simply holds my licenses so I don't have to worry about verifying online or the like. Find a trusted company which burns individual ID numbers into the dongle somehow, and I'm set.

As disturbing as the thought of having all your software tied to a piece of hardware might be for some folks, I've never misplaced my Lightwave dongle, because it just happily sits there plugged in enabling my copy 24/7/365. If I need to run on the rare occasion on my laptop, I just unplug it from here and pop it into the laptop.

Maybe a central registry could also for a nominal fee store license copies for me in case I lost them. Then I could just replace my generic dongle from them for a few bucks if my dog ate my license dongle.

In the meantime, I could download and activate games immediately online, and then I could play games without having to dig through hundreds of CDs for the friggin' key disk, or finding a crack online, or calling up WildTangent to enable more than my two unlock keys, or whatever.

[Pogo]

I think that for these types of services to become mainstream, several things have to be done. First, the service should include a way for people to backup/burn their game copy onto CDs and/or DVDs. Seeing as how CD burners are the norm with any new system, I think it's about time something like this happened. It could be included with a front-end loader of some sort, of course.

Second, there must be a way to keep the registration key permanently. If the key were generated on the spot and included as a .nfo file of some sort, and included with the game download, I think that would work. Then the backup/burn process would include this file on the copy of the CD/DVD, with instructions on how to obtain it.

I'm not sure of any other problems that could be associated with downloading games. Surely the cost of bandwidth in sending 1gb+ over the internet is nowhere near the cost of packaging/printing/shipping boxes of software, not to mention paying for shelf space? I think these services will blossom over the next several years, it'll just take time to work out the kinks.

[Gendal]

Bog, they have no mention of this on the web site. Matter of fact they specifically warn against downloading the tiny 73k client without having a boxed copy registration number. Spurred by this post, I downloaded it anyways and sure enough it has a link to plaync that lets you purchase an account online.

Sweet, the closest EB was sold out, and I didn't feel like driving around looking for it. Thanks for the heads up, and shame on guildwars.com for not advertising the fact better.

[Jonathan Blow]

Yeah, I only found the link because I heard that you could buy Guild Wars online from someone else.

I suspect that they don't want to piss off the retailers, thus they make it a little hard to find, but also, they make significantly more money from online purchases, so they don't want to make it too hard to find.

[Dazmeister]

I would have bought it from PlayNC from the off, but the fact that I could order it online (boxed) for just over half the price kinda swung me away.

Online purchases really need to reflect the savings that publishers are making before it becomes a viable method for me. That, or extras get bundled with it to justify the same price (like, y'know, the promise of Day Of Defeat at some point in my life).

[wildpokerman]

I think there is room for both the subscription type services like yahoo and the purchase bundles like Steam and also for the hybrids like totalgaming.net.

In the non digitized market there are stores like walmart and gamestop, rental companies like blockbuster and hollywood and hybrids like the game crazy stores attached to some hollywood locations and gamefly.