It hasn’t been very long that XBLA and PSN launched the DLC craze and people are already calling the game in favor of digital distribution. It must be the same people who said that the Kinect would be a viable peripheral at launch though because there is still a lot to say for physical copies of games.
To really understand DLC I think that it’s appropriate to look at what has happened to movies in the last ten years. The late 90′s saw the turn to the digital age with the advent of DVDs, bringing better quality and performance to your movies (and games too!), and also allowed you to be sure to keep those copies for years and years, depending on how well you cared for them. Then as the 2000s carried on Netflix taught us that we didn’t need to own a movie or worry about late fees let alone even leave our homes to watch the movies we love. It didn’t take long for them to make in home movie streaming a reality for the average person either. I even admit that I don’t buy nearly as many DVDs or BluRays now that I can stream the movies I want over Netflix, but I still buy them.
Even with the ease of access to movies that is available through Netflix, I only find it necessary to own certain movies to make sure that I can enjoy them at full 1080P any time I want (in case it isn’t being streamed). I don’t think that I’m alone in that either. People want to own things they spend their hard earned money on so they can do things like let a friend borrow it so that they can enjoy it as well, or at least bring it over to movie night at said friend’s house.
This I believe is even more true for video games. I want to make sure that I have my copy of whatever game that I want to play without having to worry about the requirement of being online (in case I had to change consoles and still haven’t figured out the license transfer dance, a close cousin to the Safety Dance) or losing a log in that I came up with two years ago and is now lost in digital limbo. Whatever the reason, digital content can still be an ambiguous thing to keep track of, meaning it’s also a hard thing to trust. So when companies like EA say that 20% of their annual revenue will come from DLC and other digital content, it makes me wonder if companies like these are trying to force digital content sales simply because of its resistance to piracy on consoles and the savings they see in packaging and shipping costs.
Ultimately, just like print media, I don’t foresee a complete death for physical copies of game , but the future can always prove me wrong.