Twenty-Five Percent Reduction Rate

You know the three Rs: reduce, reuse, recycle. It's good to recycle, but it's better to reuse if possible and far better to reduce by not generating products in the first place.

According to recent news, 48% of the PC games purchased in 2009 were sold online rather than at retail. If one can assume that those games would have been purchased at retail in lieu of digital distribution, then digital distribution has allowed the PC game industry to achieve a nearly 50% reduction rate!

That assumption, of course, is faulty. Because digital distribution increases convenience and enables impulse shopping, many of those sales would likely not have occurred at all at retail. Furthermore, the decline of PC games's retail presence over the years forces some sales to be digital anyway. So let's slash that figure in half. Even a 25% reduction rate is great. That's a 25% reduction in the materials and energy used to publish, distribute, and sell PC games.

The console games industry may still rely mostly on retail sales. But consoles' memory size grows to allow more games to be stored in memory rather than on disc. Also, consoles' online shops offer new, download-only games that are quite popular and increasing in sophistication. Perhaps the next generation of consoles will achieve parity between online and retail sales.

Volkswagen's Fun Theory

I learned from Andrew Sullivan's blog about Volkswagen's initiative for motivating positive change through fun innovations. They've produced a few neat inventions and invite you to submit your own ideas for the chance to win an award.

I think that by adopting digital distribution, the gaming industry has already made progress in this field even though that was not the intent. Gamers want their fun; digital distribution gives them that fun more quickly and conveniently than retail and mail-order distribution. Game publishers and distributors, in turn, spend less on packaging and shipping. The benefits extend to the environment as an afterthought, but they are there.

One of Volkswagen's inventions is, in fact, a simple arcade game. I'm trying to think of other ways that games can be used to encourage environmental stewardship.

PSP Go Green?

The buzz on the PSP Go, Sony's new handheld gaming console, is that it's the latest of Sony's many missteps this console generation. Ars Technica finds it to be a poor value compared to the older versions of the PSP, while Destructoid struggles to find the positives.

I've never been interested enough in the PSP to buy one, but I hope that the Go succeeds. It is, to my knowledge, the first gaming system with an expanding library that does not use physical media. I would like to see all video and computer gaming systems abandon physical media in favor of the environmentally better option of digital distribution. Perhaps the PSP should have and could have done this from its first launch in 2005 rather than burden stores and users with a whole new (and eventually failed) physical medium, the Universal Media Disc.

It's unfortunate that the game acquisition process on the PSP Go is apparently cumbersome, that owners of UMD games cannot transfer the games to the Go for free, and that the Go requires its own proprietary cables (another environmental failure). But if I wanted a PSP, I'd probably get the Go. The lack of physical media appeals to me. And there does seem to be significant progress in making the PSP library available online; of the five PSP games I'd consider buying (Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness, Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, Jeanne D'Arc, Patapon 2, and Yggdra Union), four are available on the PlayStation Store. That's not bad.

Even if the Go fails, it is notable as a gaming system that requires no cartridges or discs. I hope that Sony is able to improve its digital distribution infrastructure to make the Go more attractive to gamers. Perhaps Sony could have countered some of the criticism by proposing the Go as an environmentally safer handheld system.

Are Physical Media Here to Stay?

Digital distribution of games and movies grows in popularity, which gives me hope that that it will one day replace physical distribution altogether. You can already access large libraries of games for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii and PC without buying a single disc. How soon will we see game systems that don't accept physical media at all? Imagine PCs and consoles that don't have disc drives; all software would be downloaded via the Internet. Eliminating disc drives would conserve the mineral and energy resources used to manufacture, transport, and operate them. In an online-only world, companies may need to buy more servers to store and distribute content and consumers may use more electricity to download the content; I think, however, that the resource savings from abandoning physical media would be very significant.

The next time you are at a retail store, look at the shelves of movie and game discs and imagine them disappearing. Imagine all the resources that would be conserved if you could get all your entertainment choices at home.



I've been wondering about the possibility of the next Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo console going media-less. (PCs, having much larger software libraries, would be slow to follow). But a recent episode of Cheap Ass Gamer's podcast forces me to realize the minuteness of this possibility. In CAGcast episode 157, at 1:53:10, Stewart "Wombat" Nacht responds to a listener's fear of a total movement to digital distribution (which he thinks would mean the end of money-saving clearances and coupons) with the following:

"It's not gonna happen! Everything isn't going to move to digital distribution. There's too much space set aside in these big-box retailers for video games and there's so much invested in it and there's so many marketing dollars that are pushed towards it. The companies want their consoles to be sold in these retail stores, where they would lose so much money if they got rid of the disc-based media that they would probably stop selling the consoles in those stores ... Yes, I understand the technology is there to do digital distribution. Yes, it can be done. But it won't be done, because too many companies would have to eat too much money for it to happen."

David "CheapyD" Abrams then points out how impulse buying, important to game sales, would go away if you no longer could browse shelves of video games while you're at Wal-Mart to buy toothpaste or a plunger. I see his point. Even though I rarely buy games these days, I often give game shelves a quick look before I leave a retail store. That, of course, leads me to browse other departments at the store, increasing the chance that I'll buy something. A complete switch to digital distribution would mean the loss of a wing of merchandise. Retailers would fight hard to prevent it.



Shopping at markets is an ancient practice we're not likely to give up soon, even for the very recent addition of video games. But the rise in digital distribution tells me that companies and consumers share an interest in convenience and cost-cutting. This shared interest will keep digital distribution going and growing.

Despite the well-reasoned doubts expressed on CAGcast, I think we'll switch completely to digital distribution someday. It might not happen in time for the Xbox 361, PlaySt4tion, or Wiii, but it will happen. We'll keep buying consoles and PCs at stores, but we'll also increase our acceptance and adoption of digital distribution. There will come a time, perhaps when digital distribution accounts for half of all revenue in software sales, when publishers suddenly become interested in going exclusively online. Will retailers let them? At first, they won't; then, they'll open their own digital storefronts to partake in online distribution so they won't get left behind. The concept of physical media will then go the way of the floppy.