Buying games

One week before going live, City of Heroes threw open its doors and send invites to its open beta to everybody who ever applied, including me. While I'm grateful that I have the chance to play around with CoH for a week already, this move also leads to a very strange situation: I am able to play until release, will then get kicked out of the game, and will get back into the game about 2 weeks later, when my pre-ordered copy of CoH arrives by mail. Because in spite of being "the future of gaming", online games still stick unnecessarily close to the old distribution channels.

Me playing in open beta clearly proves that it is technically possible to download these games and play them. But the game company insists that I go out and buy a box with a CD if I want to play in the live version. Now getting a box with a CD is not trivial for everybody. I live in Europe, where CoH isn't released, so I have to import it. But even if I lived in the United States, I might not necessarily live close enough to a computer games shop to be able to get every game on the day of its release.

Already now, smaller MMORPG like A Tale in the Desert offer the possibility of downloading the client, playing a free trial for a week, and then just paying the monthly fee if you decide to stay. The same even exists for single-player games, go to Trygames and download not-quite-top-ten games like Temple of Elemental Evil, or Master of Orion II. You can test them for a while, and if you decide you like them, you pay by credit card online, and the game is "unlocked". I did that for Temple of Elemental Evil (a nice, single-player, 3ed D&D rules RPG), and even received the right to install the game on up to five computers. Sure, you don't have the CD, the manual is in .pdf format, and you don't have any nice printed maps or anything. But you can buy games whenever you like this way, in whatever place you live, at whatever time, and without leaving your house.

Now I see the interest of a game company to charge me $50 or so for the boxed CD, instead of just $13 or so, for the first month of play. But if you deduce the cost of the box, the CD, the printed manual, the distribution, they should be able to charge me half that price, something between $20 and $30, and still make more money of me than if I bought the box. A win-win situation, with the distributor being the only one losing out. But that is probably the rub: The distributor is most likely insisting on some exclusive deal, so if the game company wants its games in the games stores, they can't offer it online as well. I just wish that this changes in the future, with more and more people getting broadband, which makes downloading a 1 Gigabyte game less of a problem than going out and buying the box.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:40 AM Permanent Link