Digital Days

At Gamasutra today, I talked to Direct2Drive guy Jamie Berger for a really fascinating look at just how quickly digital distribution has grown up. It's amazing how fast it's happening; when you think about it, it was really only yesterday that full-size downloadable games were just a way publishers could try to put some extra legs on their catalog titles. It's affected the casual space, too -- it's hard to even recall now that PopCap used to be just a portal.

Of course, how far we are off from that mythical day when no one buys games at retail anymore is still an unanswered question (assuming we'll ever even get there!), and cloud computing and streaming services on the horizon put an extra smudge on our crystal ball.

But much of the response to my article from Gamasutra commenters is aimed at GameStop, and how so many people hope it'll just disappear.

Do you have any GameStop horror stories? Everyone does, but I mean... I go there anyway. 'Cause I'm lazy. If you're a hater, do you have experiential reasons for disliking the retailer, or is it just a Big Evil Corporation, which is Mean?

And how do you buy your games? I've started a new sidebar poll to gauge how prevalent certain distro methods are for you all, because my attempt to stage a massively-attended Metroid-versus-Vania supremacy poll fell pretty flat. Not even 300 votes? Y'all have let me down.

The final result was 176 votes for Super Metroid, 119 for SotN, but you don't care, do you. You don't care at all! Excuse me, I've got a pillow to sob into for a while.

Okay, I'm all right now. Bonus digital distro material from our network: GamerBytes' Ryan Langley shrewdly points out ten things PlayStation Network needs to clean up before it can compete with XBLA from a storefront perspective. My usage of both services, personally, is pretty equal, but I've still gotta agree with him.

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