Every Monday the LeftStickRight team will take on a different topic surrounding news or interesting topics about games or the gaming industry and open it up for discussion. Our three editors will give their perspective and you are welcome to give your own. Agree? Disagree?

This week we welcome Justin Amirkhani of General Games for a special guest appearance.

The topic this week is: What is the biggest limitation on the future of downloadable games? What will halt an online only future?

Justin’s Take

I think a lot of the time it’s easy for us to forget that a majority of people still buy all their games at traditional brick and mortar stores. Those of us who choose to immerse ourselves in gaming have these blinders up that keep us from seeing what’s really going on with the average person. Just because we, as early adopters and alpha users, have all agreed that digital distribution is the way of the future doesn’t mean that the rest of the world has.

Talking to any casual game player you’ll find that there’s an inherent lack of trust in the intangible. There’s a mistrust in the concept of paying for a theoretical item with real money. At the center of this mistrust are two key issues, people don’t like the idea of not owning their collections and the lack of value added to digital versions.

Compare prices for a digital download and a retail copy of any game and you’ll find that a majority of the time they’re the same price, which makes no sense. If players are forced to hand over the security and reliability of a real-world product for bits and bytes they shouldn’t pay the same for less. This is a fundamental flaw in the current digital distribution model and one that won’t be remedied as long as publishers can sell the less of a product at a wider margin.

Similarly when you buy a physical copy of a game you own it and it’s on that disc and every time you put it in your console it will play. When you buy a digital game your ownership and ability to use that game is entirely dependent on whether or not the company is still operating, if they’re still supporting the game and whether or not you have enough licenses left for a re-install. For the average consumer there’s no way you can trade in the reliability of a retail copy at the same price.

Tim’s Take

You had to get me started, didn’t you. The biggest obstacle to downloadable games at this point in time is the fact that a significant amount of the market still does not own the capability to download the games!

Broadband access runs rampant in urban and suburban areas, but there are still people who have chosen not to purchase it, and many rural places have not been granted the cable or lines necessary to even consider it. Data released February from a U.S. Commerce Department survey states that around 35 percent of homes and 40 percent of people in the country do not have broadband. This includes people who simply don’t want it, people who find it too expensive and those for whom it’s not a possibility at all.

Numbers do look viable for downloadable games as a whole: 66 percent of urban homes and 54 percent of rural homes were subscribed to broadband in October 2009, according to the survey, and in the key market of people ages 18-24 a whopping 81 percent had access. Even so, for the future of downloadable games not to stagnate, broadband must be made available to more homes through lower prices and wider access; because even though it’s possible for 60 percent of people to download your game, 100 percent can still get their hands on a hard copy. Further complicating matters is that if people are given access to broadband, it has to be the right kind for downloadable games if they are to also be played online. A lot of rural people have satellite internet because it’s the only available option. It will let them download a game, but has such inferior upload speeds that anything played over the connection would be a lagfest.

Unfortunately, broadband access is largely a political and financial issue, and I haven’t seen game companies lobbying for it. I did, however, call up the local DSL provider in my area, Verizon, and asked them when they would ever bring DSL to my area. The representative on the other end of the line cheerfully stated that it is the mission of the company to grant high-speed internet access to everyone under their coverage area. And you know what? I believe her!

…Oh, wait. That was 4 years ago.

Ian Y’s Take

The biggest limitations to downloadable games are that they are completely digital. Compared to the status quo, purchasing games without any physical media has its disadvantages.

Firstly, downloads lack don’t elicit the same kind of emotions that tangible products do. Having something to hold in your hand provides a certain sense of reassurance that you didn’t just drop 50 bucks on something totally ephemeral. Plus, there is the entire aspect of games asa collectible that is otherwise circumvented.

Secondly and more importantly, digital only games distribution creates several practical issues that primarily hurt the consumer. For example, it makes selling second-hand/renting and lending games virtually impossible. Without the physical media, there’s really no practical way to distribute games to others past the point of purchase unless you plan on carrying around your console’s hard-drive around with you to a friend’s house.

And then there’s the problem of storage. I don’t know about you, but my game library far outstretches the available space on any of my consoles. Even with upgrades, I have more games thancan be practically stored digitally. At the moment the industry wide solution to this is to track your purchases on servers so that you can delete games and re-download them later. But even this fix has major pitfalls associated with it, most notably publishers’ propensity to cut-off digital service whenever they feel the need to. That massive digital only game library you’ve spent so much money on will disappear the minute your console manufacturer decides to shut-down it’s servers, vaporizing any games not saved on your HD.

Ian H’s Take

Back when I was using the Royal We (even though it was mostly just Royal Me) I wrote about the limitations of the next-generation of consoles and a few of the points I mentioned in there still stand to me as elements that can bring digital distribution to a screeching halt. The big one for me is the limitations of service in many areas, but not just in the actual availability of broadband. While I think that in itself is an issue, it will eventually come to a head. The most startling development in the world of the internet is the lack of malleability on the part of the service providers and the amount of content they are prepared to provide.

Take for example a good ol’ Canadian example of Rogers Communications. They were on display at this year’s Fan Expo in Toronto talking up their 50 Mbps service geared specifically towards gamers so that you can game harder, play faster and shout louder. Yet, this service was hampered by packet shaping and bandwidth caps that maxed out at a number that would easily clear you a few game downloads every week or so, not including the bandwidth of your normal internet use. 175 GB was the official number and while that can seem like a boatload of gigs, considering a Blu-Ray disc now can run up to 40 GB it doesn’t seem like a lot if you are picturing a nearly minted online exclusive distribution system.

The other trend I’m noticing now that I did not mention is the splintering of the online markets. While Steam, a distribution and DRM software championed by the creators of the Half Life series, is oft-considered the de facto standard of the digital marketplace, there are quite a lot of other services around and even many publishers that will not utilize that particular system in order to better control their user-base.

Lastly, visibility is a matter of stark importance that rarely seems to be addressed when it comes to online games. Microsoft’s dashboard can lead you to a world of independently created and published games, some of which are absolute gems, but actually navigating to them in a sea of content is extremely difficult. While opening up the marketplace with digital services, it also causes the virtual shelf space to look a bit crowded at times and navigating through that crowd is not always easy. Retailers have a system in place to manage such things currently, and this is something that is improving as time goes on, but the difference with retail shops and digital shops is that retail eventually dispatches with their copies with little argument. Removing digital content seems to create much more a stir, so online shops end up acting as some sort of Smithsonian as well as a platform for the hottest new things. It’s not easy to pick apart as a layman and I imagine as the amount of content grows that may continue.