Atari/Infogrames Transitioning to Digital Distribution of Games

[Guest]

Infogrames/Atari CEO David Gardner said that the company plans to go 90 percent digital within a few years.

Atari/Infogrames Transitioning to Digital Distribution of Games : Read more

 

[Guest]

Well I for one won't be switching to digitial distribution anytime soon. Not that I wouldn't want to, but with my crappy ISP I could get maybe 1-2 games a month if I didn't want to really push my download limit.
I'm sure in the not to distant future games are going to get to the size where I couldn't even get 1 in a month. In fact if I didn't have our ISP's "premium" service of 20GB/month I couldn't even have gotten WAR in a single month.

If companies want to push digitial distribution they are going to have to go to all the smaller ISPs and get them to change their pathetically low download limits. At this point I would just love to have Comcast's subscribers problems of being limited to 250GB.

 

[stromm]

Digital Distribution is a HUGE loss for consumers and only favors the publisher. I've been waiting for one of the major players to admit this is their aim.

It's a loss for us because even after we've purchase the game, we're totally at the publisher's mercy when we want to re-install it. I have 20 year old games on disk that I still enjoy. Without that disk, I am not confident that even next month I will be able to reinstall. Take the recent Xbox Live arcade purge. Look at the issues with movies and the PS3.

The win for the publisher is that after the game has been "retired", they can later come back with a slightly updated version and make us pay AGAIN for the game. Doesn't matter that we were happy with the original and don't like the "udpated" version.

Even though I use steam, it's one of the things that worries me. I have to have an internet connection to reinstall my games. Shouldn't be that way.