The DVD in your hard drive, the sleek packaging on the shelf, the poster included for your wall. These are the trappings of PC gaming’s present. The future may look a bit different, though: surf to a gaming platform on the Internet, download your title, and commence playing.
There are already a number of providers of this type — and unless the experts are woefully mistaken, at least some of them will break through. That will bring with it any number of benefits, but some questions as well.
The underlying principle is tremendously simple: the gamer sets up a user account, selects a title, goes to the virtual checkout and downloads the title to a hard drive. There’s no lack of choices: “Some 90 to 95 percent of current titles are now on Internet platforms,” says Christian Schmidt from Germany’s GameStar magazine.
The world’s most popular site of this type is Steam (http://store.steampowered.com), supported by game-maker Valve, of Half-Life fame. Nevertheless the platform also features titles from nearly all current publishers.
Other players on the market include Gametap (http://www.gametap.com), an American firm, and Gamers Gate (http://www.GamersGate.com), which is based in Sweden. Microsoft’s Games for Windows Live also includes games for download from various publishers. “There are also special platforms like gog.com,” Schmidt says. The “gog” stands for “Good old games,” with the focus on classic titles.
Major manufacturers offer titles both on platforms like these and on their own portals. “Our top PC titles are also available as digital downloads,” says Norman Habakuck from Ubisoft. “In the current version of the Ubi Shop, once you purchase a game, you then receive an email message with a download link and activation key,” Habakuck says.
Electronic Arts (EA) also supports this distribution channel. Purchasers must first download the EA Download Manager. That software is then used to launch…