I read that Gamestop pulled DoW II because of Steam, but they're still selling Empire TW which, AFAIK, uses Steamworks. Considering Gamestop hardly sells PC games these days, I say screw 'em, but it is a shot across the bow. I'd hate for retailers to strong-arm publishers away from convenient systems like Steam and Impulse. Ignoring digital sales really worked for the music industry during the early 2000s.

Within 10 years, I don't see retail being the driving force in the videogame industry. Look forward to the inevitable liquidation sales at Gamecrap.

Throttling back retail sales of a popular title will do nothing to counter the competition to retail posed by online sales. If anything, they will simply accelerate a gravitation towards online venues.

They might try hiring people who know something (anything...) about PC gaming, and actually devote some effort to in-store promotion/placement of PC releases. Up here in Saskatchewan the local outlets treat PC games as negligible tertiary things they just happen to have junked about, new releases being things they may or may not carry. Everything else is slavishly and absurdly devoted to consoles.

When you compare walking into an environment like that to the attentions displayed by an Impulse or a Steam arena, the latter retail arguments seem fairly persuasive...

This is sort of like a salesman giving you bad advice instead of giving you advice that may point you to another store. Sure, the salesman thwarts a sale at a competitor, but they also bullshit you, and bullshitters don`t inspire me to return to them for anything.

Unfortunately, if you look at Gamestop's end of the year numbers, they made a gigantic profit thanks largely in part to used console game sales. Even if they stop bothering with PC games completely, they make enough revenue on console games to come out pretty far on top.

There will be an Impulse component (the Impulse Reactor), but it will not require the Impulse client like the one we use now (that contains the store). The reactor stuff will be handled through the DLL, it sounds like, without needing to have the Impulse Client to add the game registration. The only thing the article isn't very clear on is how patching will work - will we need the client to patch the game, or will the DLL provide a means for a direct connection to SD servers through an in-game patcher?

I have to agree with Annatar yet again.

Hell as long as consoles are a big market factor then B&M secondhand shops will rake in the cash. It is a good thing I'm a PC only guy.

It sounds like the brick and mortor shops have started to take notice of the digital distribution platforms as competitors. They can keep selling the kiddies scratched up used console games for all I care. Being in a small town with the only place to buy PC games being Walmart, I'm glad to have access to games from Impulse and Steam. I can get games I otherwise wouldn't have access to(in a timely manner) and get them right away.

Retail establishments have been putting pressure on publishers to let them release games before the digital download is available for a while now.

I think they've realised that the gaming world is starting to make the shift away from the physical and more into the digital realm. It's not going to be all-digital any time soon but with Steam and Impulse and Direct2Drive and all the others covering the PC side and on the console side you have XBOX Live Marketplace and the PSN and Wii online stores...

They've got to hang onto their business as long as they can and putting pressure on publishers to not use Steam or Impulse is certainly one way to try and do that.

But digital downloads aren't going to go away. For one thing they let us buy games at 3am, a rare occurence with a bricks and mortar store.

Gamestop makes most of its money from used console game sales, yes. The one thing publishers hate more than ANYTHING is the second-hand market. I expect next gen consoles to have bigger and better digital distribution services. On the PC side, millions of people willingly surrender the ability to resell and/or transfer games in exchange for various services. Publishers see this and would kill to have the same thing happen on the console side. MS, Sony, and Nintendo more than anyone, since they'd receive more $/game sold digitally.

Consoles utterly depend on retail sales at the moment, so a digital distribution "revolution" isn't happening anytime soon. Once digital sales reach a critical mass, you can start playing hardball with retailers. Until then, they've got you by the balls.

I don't expect physical copies to vanish, but digital distribution is a long-term threat to Gamestop's business model.

If Big Media's resistance to digital distro is any indication, GS will go down kicking and screaming.

I'll probably always buy my games from Retailers but will use Steam or Impulse to run them so this is kinda bad...maybe if I get a credit card I may buy games online but until then....all I can say is...hmmm.

-Phalnax Krassius

Sergeant, Sniper of the 1st Spec Ops Division

Will Dawn of War 2 be Steam dependant for patching and multiplayer and the like? In essense just like all of Valves games.

Retailers pulling stupid shit is why I don't buy hardly anything from them these days.  They're suffering another form of the same idiocy the game industry as a whole is.  The retail chains are just steadily getting rid of any reasons to shop at them by making it a waste of time with no advantages, like being able to return software that doesn't work.  It's the mentality that lost sales happen in a vacuum and any actions to counter them wont have adverse effects.

This shouldn't be a worry for Stardock, as I doubt the Stardock demographic would be crushed by the game not being carried at Gamestop, they'd just go get it through Impulse, and the people new who would be interested in it generally don't buy a lot of used console games.   I do think the future is Direct Download services, but we're 5-10 years off from that being more then a small percentage (10-20%) of game sales due to poor American internet.

 

What could really hurt Stardock is if bandwidth caps become universal.  If Stardock has any lobbyist types, I'd be placing the resources there.

 

Not saying this as anti-console, I own a 360 myself- as that's the only way I can play some games, but I'd rather play them on PC.

 

 

hehe it uses GFWL for matchmaking and patches. So the game is tied into Steam and GFWL...

Der... well thats even worse. Ah well I probably won't have enough time to master the gameplay enough for multiplayer but singleplayer at least should be a blast.