While Ben's article polarised opinions on whether or not digital distribution is being embraced here in Australia, I thought it is time to look at why, logistically, it is not possible in the current state of both Australian internet services, and platform idiosyncrasies, to rely only on.
First and foremost, some hard data. As recently as June 2011, around 10.3 million "broadband" connections were in place - where "broadband" is considered a connection with a speed greater than 256kbps. Of these, just under 4.8 million were classed as "mobile internet" services - a higher number than the amount of DSL connections, which stood at just under 4.5 million. Anyone who has actually tried a mobile internet device, or even browsed the web for a few minutes on their smartphone, knows two things:
1) The speed simply is not fast enough for long enough to make downloading anything over a couple of megabytes sustainable; and
2) Data prices are far too steep to make this a feasible way to download large files.
"But Tom," I hear you say, "we still have over five million high-speed internet users!" While this may be true, think about a couple of things - namely, the number of people who do not have high-download broadband plans, and the number of people whose speed is still below 3 megabits per second (and who cannot increase this speed). While making a plan change to bump up the quota may seem a trivial and obvious solution to ourselves, a huge number of account holders, often the people who do not play games themselves, do not see the value in doing so. This is especially true for customers stuck on Telstra Wholesale, ADSL1-capable exchanges, as the prices and quotas are usually significantly less generous than those of us on ADSL2 capable exchanges.
The big pushers for digital distribution in Australia are Steam users, and, given how flawlessly the download service works, this is perfectly understandable. However, each of the consoles have less than comparable download services. Without the ability to comprehensively manage downloads, digital distribution will always be hard to embrace for console users. Systems need to be in place to easily schedule, pause and generally oversee downloads. Updates need to be proactively downloaded before I go to start a game; heck, the PlayStation doesn’t even let you do this in the background, essentially rendering your console a loud brick, sometimes up to 30 minutes at a time, five or six times over the life of a game (unless you pay $70 a year for the ‘privilege’ of PlayStation+). Until these management systems are in place, consoles simply cannot support total digital distribution.
Another of the purported bonuses of digital distribution is the lower price tag customers pay for products. However, as seen with many Steam titles, this lower price is not always passed on to customers. While Steam’s catalogue is enormous, and there are numerous, very high-quality games at low prices, new releases certainly attract an Australian Dollar premium. Modern Warfare 3 still retails at 99.99AUD, compared to around 59.99USD. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is at 89.99AUD, and again at 59.99AUD. While some price disparity is inevitable, digital distribution eliminates most of the factors previously blamed for higher prices, the most obvious (and frequent) of which was the proposed shipping charge to send goods “all that way” to Australia.
If the prices are not substantially better for digital content than disc-based content, there is absolutely no reason for me to spend anywhere from 1 to 3 hours waiting for a game to download, when I could go to the store 5 minutes away and pick it up in person. This is not an argument about whether having a downloaded game is better than a physical disc - everyone has their own preferences there. It is simply commonsense, though, to buy the game from a store, and not waste large amounts of download quota, unless you are making a hefty saving doing so.
While the impending rollout of the National Broadband Network may look to increase both access and speed across a majority of Australia, it is still a number of years from completion - even many of the early metropolitan areas have not yet had fibre cable paths laid. In addition, there are currently too few high-speed, high-quota services in place, and consoles do not have the management services in place to support a digital-only distribution system in Australia. Until these issues are taken care of, digital distribution is too inconvenient, and unsustainable, to take effect.
By Tom Hughes
Would you rather digital-only distribution for your games? Where do you think the system breaks down, and how long do you think it will be until consoles AND PC’s are both digital-only platforms? Leave your comments below!