eBooks and video games

[Rev]

According to LA Times, print books are back, baby. Ebooks hit a ceiling of 25%, where they were predicted to be more than 50% in 2015.

That's awesome. Really good news. Over the last few months I've begun to wonder (with the whole Wii U debacle) if physical games will perhaps continue, but now will have games go out of print much sooner than they normally would.. Meaning if you want a physical copy you must buy quick or lose your chance to own the game at a reasonable price.

[VideoGameCritic]

This interesting post led me to do a little research:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/busin ... .html?_r=0

http://fortune.com/2015/09/24/ebook-sales/

The first article is the original, the second is a counterpoint. But it's the comments after the second article that are most enlightening.

"I suspect what's happening is that the digital market is becoming the equivalent of fast food dining."

"Until DRM is abandoned....no one is going to build a "real" digital library."

"Ridiculous ambiguities about the ownership of all digital media. When I pay Amazon, Apple or whoever for digital books, music, apps or whatever to what extent do I own it versus merely renting it until I die, let some retail account lapse, or the technology changes?"

Sound familiar? They're basically the same arguments being used against digital distribution of video games.

You guys know where I stand on this stuff. The media are not technology savvy and they blow all new tech out of proportion. Except for the convenience factor, there's no substitute for real media you can hold in your hand. I think most people are starting to realize this, at least with regard to games and books. Whether physical music media can survive is a little harder to say, but the staying power of CDs and revitalization of vinyl may be an indicator.

I'd like to hear your thoughts.

[Shapur]

Well one exception for gaming. Gog.com
You absolutely can own non-DRM digital media. With GOG, I can backup and store any game I want and use it forever without restriction.

Most mp3's are the same nowadays. As far as I know Amazon mp3s have no restrictions. You can burn 'em, back them up and re-download if you lose everything. Of course you can do all that with the real CD, usually pay the same price and get a nicer case to go with it. With MP3's I still consider it a decent deal though because how often do I really want more than 3 songs from the album?

I'm all about the ownership. I love the physical media, but non-DRM digital media is not bad at all and hard to argue against really. If I could buy ebooks without DRM....I still wouldn't because I just prefer flipping pages to using my E-reader(E-reader is great for projectgutenberg). I do buy games off of GOG and I would buy digital movies if they were unrestricted files that I could burn,backup and use as I please.

[pacman000]

Eliminating physical games won't really happen as long as Gamestop and larger stores like Wal-Mart and Best Buy have any say- good luck getting them to stock consoles that they won't be able to sell any games for. Gamestop in particular faces an existential threat from any sort of digital-only console as its entire business model is based around used physical media.

Even if (or unfortunately, when) one or both of the Big Two decides to launch an all-digital console, there will still be a market for physical games. It goes beyond things like lack of Internet/capped connections and higher cost of digital goods due to shortsighted greed. People like tangibles- things they can actually hold and derive a sense of ownership from that can never be matched by any digital download. Just look at how high "retro" titles are climbing on price and demand and shrinking in availability for proof of this- anything from before the 360/PS3 generation is going up, up, up. A lot of that has to do with people being turned off by the downward direction the game industry has been heading and the realization that there's 40+ years of physical copies of great games out there to play.

Target briefly stocked the Ouya, and high price of retro games has to do with nostalgia. Still, I agree with you. People like to own things. This is physical media's advantage.