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Valve's digital sales will soon top retail sales
Speaking at a press event at its headquarters, Valve president Gabe Newell has revealed the company is seeing close to 200% growth in digital distribution compared to traditional retail sales growth of less than 10%. Newell went on to explain how much more reliable online digital distribution is compared to retail, pointing out that all Steam games can be easily accessed from any computer and that that users don’t need to re-buy the same game multiple times they lose it.
He further reiterated the possibility of offering non-gaming software through the Steam platform in the future, though for the time being they are keeping their focus on games.
User Comments: 5
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Digital distribution in my opinion is really good, I rarely get to go to EBGames since I do not have a car and that means a 2 hour bike ride if I really want to go.
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I personally like the online distribution. Saves resources such as plastic, etc. Plus, it's a nice thing that Valve allows for re-distribution of it's gaming content to it's consumers, in case they should need a new copy.
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There are only 2 problems:At LANs, its MUCH harder to install one copy of a game on everyones computer so everyone can playAnd if you ever take your computer somewhere without internet, you generally cannot play that game (Steam offline mode blows...)
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[quote]There are only 2 problems:At LANs, its MUCH harder to install one copy of a game on everyones computer so everyone can play[/quote]Assuming you have a license to install a non-steam game on as many computers as you want, go ahead and use it.[quote]And if you ever take your computer somewhere without internet, you generally cannot play that game (Steam offline mode blows...)[/quote]Works fine here.
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If digital sales do top retail, then I want the savings to be past on to the consumers. I love the deals Valve do for a bunch of games by each developer for a very reasonable price. But on Steam when a top game comes out, you still get slow-ish speeds (I got 80Kbps download HL2: Episode 2; but normally get 400Kbps) in downloading. And I know they have servers all over the world. Its even worse if you happen to have slow broadband in your area, so you therefor have to buy the retail version than wait hours to download 5Gb of data. If the price is right, I'd always be prepared to wait for my game to download - but not for days on end.
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