Patapon 2

So if I'm to understand their customer service comments correctly, bricking modified Wii's is now policy rather than an unintentional but acceptable coincidence? It's not a policy. They are just saying that it isn't their problem. The same thing as if you put your console near an edge and it dropped to the floor and broke. I don't blame them on that part. Punishing the legitimate users is something unacceptable, but they are now compensating for that too.

  

Welcome to my Blog folks, 

While we do indeed live in an age of impressive technological advances in almost every aspect of our daily lives, from the trip to the local hospital to watching your favourite TV shows on a screen so big, that folks think your compensating for something. Yet even these wonderful advances, are always under some form of attack or often used to simply do harm to the specific industries, the companies involved in those industries and of course ourselves. I'm talking about digitalized content if you weren't sure, sometimes my rambling words get lost in the jungle of deadly nonsense. Let's not ignore the slow change to the digital form of distribution we are currently seeing for ourselves in the videogame industry. It's a topic I've also been a little unsure about, while I see it as an obviously smart form of defence against those nasty evil pirate folk. I simply can never truly see the videogame industry going digital only throughout. 

The whole 'going digital' debate, which as been discussed again and again. Recently came back to my ever confused mind, with the confirmation of Sony's PSP Go! Now I have no wish to ramble on about the new PSP in this blog, but it's sudden and some might say risky decision to go digital only. Is a clear sign of the ever changing face of videogame distribution. While Sony have promise a method of UMD usage on the PSP Go! Even though there is no such UMD drive on the newest version of portable system. I think it's clear that Sony, who have been bitten by the scratchy bug of piracy more then once, feel it's about time for the industry to change to fight a bigger evil. Now as we all know, digitally delivered games are a common sight nowadays. I still find it funny thinking back to the first time I downloaded a demo for a console game, or the first time I played Geometry Wars and realized that this was the new true home of arcade gaming. Digital distribution is a part of gaming now, and for the most part it's a good thing. 

There is no denying that selling games digitally does have it's advantages and we all know them well enough. But the true advantages of distributing games in this way, will not be felt if pirates can still 'pirate' the retail versions of these games. It's somewhat throwing the whole point of digitally sold games out of the window, so only a true digitalized distribution system in the videogame industry might work in stopping the evil folk torrenting the expensively produced games of today. This push would also mean the end of retail videogame sales, infact just saying that makes this whole argument kind of pointless. While there are those who would back the push towards digitally delivered games as the only means to purchase titles in our much loved industry, it would never work at this current time. Especially when one considers how important retail sales are to shops around the globe, not to mention the fact that not every gamer as an internet connection good enough to handle massive amounts of digital content. 

So now is clearly not the time for this change, but I could see it being a real possibility in the years to come. Sony's attempts to make all their future games digitally available through the Playstation Store is another small step towards this possible future, but we should also not forget Sony's promise to still sell UMD versions of PSP games. But their decision to go digital won't have an immediate affect on sales or a massive affect on piracy currently badly affecting the portable system, but with gamers eventually choosing to buy a PSP Go! (hopefully once the high pricetag goes down) then a clear change might be possible in the battle against torrented videogames. It's clearly one hell of a battle for the industry, and one they might never truly win. Who knows, maybe OnLive is the future of the videogame industry as we know it.... nah probably not! But I do believe we have begun the battle, and it's still possible that the gaming industry will not be fighting alone in this war. Let's not forget that piracy affects movies, music, software and many other forms of entertainment.

Everyone as their own personal views on this debate, I'm still not sure how I feel about digitally delivered videogames. While I love the rebirth and reimaging of arcade styled games on Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Store and Wiiware. I'm not sure I'd be over the moon with having to download a specific videogame the size of a good five to eight gigabyte of content to my console or PC. Not to even consider the size requirements future harddrives would need, it's clear that there are a lot of obstacles still in it's path until it can officially become a true possibility. It may never happen, as I said previously the sale of retail games on the highstreet stores are key to the success of so many companies. Unless a code styled Patapon 2 form of retail sale is used, though even that requires a internet connection and I'd also like to mention the lack of credit or debit card usage for many online stores. Xbox Live for example does not support many of the widely available cards of the UK, issues like this would need to be solved. So it's possible that it may never happen like we think it will, maybe some new form of distribution we have yet to see will be the answer to the way we buy games in the future.

Is a digitally distributed only future an actual possibility for the industry as a whole?