Monday, July 03, 2006

Another broken business model

While passing time at the mall, I decided to see what was new for PC video games. My selection has been relegated to 3 shelves in the middle of the store - basically about 60 boxes or so. Now the PC games have to compete for shelf space with PSP, Playstation 2, Gameboy Advance, Nintendo Gamecube & DS, Xbox 360, etc. I hope a few of these competing game systems die off - not because I dislike any of them, but because I want some decent quantity of PC games in stock again someday. My other alternative of course is Amazon et al, but why should I have to pay shipping to wait for a game to be delivered to my home in a few days when I used to be able to get what I wanted........... n-nnnow? Yet the industry wonders why people download pirated copies of games from the Internet................

Solution: make it possible to order your fave video game at the local store and they burn it to CD / DVD while you wait (under 5 minutes). The games would be either archived locally or streamed to the store via secure network connection. No shipping costs to assume and be able to buy anything ever made....

3 comments:

Jeff Adzigian said...

Sounds good Karl, but the only thing I see with that is amount of money the distributors would be losing. I imagine both the video game packaging and booklet design firms have produced a multi-million dollar industry since pong first hit the shelves. While I have thought about the same idea as you regarding the streaming of games directly to your xbox or PSP via a high speed connection, there would inveriable be some opposition from those special interest groups. Just like oil, there is too much money in a "century old technology" to change to something that works better and benefits society.

Karl Plesz said...

Food for thought people.

Anonymous said...

Another thing to consider karl, is some of the copy protection techniques that rely on the factory discs that the games are pressed on. Although these techniques are still defeateable, all the money invested in this stupid technology would have been wasted if a store just had to repress a copy for purchase.
(And good point on the garbage design firms).