Some interesting news here - Apparently digital sales have finally surpassed boxed games. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I pretty much only buy games if they are on Steam now.
not hard to see why since game have pretty much stopped doing PC games now period. i went to my local when the missus was out shopping and they had a single tier for PC that consisted of a few games such as WoW and starcraft II and the rest were old budget games i.e. 3 for £15 jobs. i dont buy off steam unless its in the sale as its very very expensive compared to online like play.com or amazon. I usually get new releases for £25-30 from play but on steam thier £40.
Last game I bought boxed... was... I think it was Command and Conquer3: Kane's Wrath to be perfectly honest. I've bought everything on steam since then. Sure... little more expensive, but I lose discs fairly quickly and I'll pay millions to get rid of the "D:Error Please insert the correct disc and try again." message that totally destroys my enjoyment of games, simply because in frustrates me having to find discs
I still buy boxed as its cheaper and I getto thumb a manual or have a nice map etc. for my game for example, none of which you get with the more expensive digital download. Still I register it with steam after I have bought it though
I would be buyign from Steam more often but the face that it doesnt accept debit cards annoys me. I don't want to ask my dad to use his credit card and I don't want to use paypal either.
It's important to note than not one of the biggest digital distributors (including Steam) actually releases sales figures for their platforms. So these numbers are just projections based on survey results, not actual sales figures.
Every game on Steam comes with a PDF manual. Not like manuals are particularly pretty nowadays. I just cracked open a virgin first release copy of Freelancer last week and the manual impressed the **** out of me. They don't make 'em like that no more.
Ah, no they don't accept Maestro. You could always ask your bank for a Visa Debit instead (formerly called Delta, I believe). Or Mastercard debit (whatever the equivalent is. I don't like Mastercard).
I can understand what a milestone this may or may not be considered. But myself, I don't like it, I purchase alot of games through Steam and more recently I tried out the Ubisoft store, which was reasonable. But...maybe I am being a bit backwards but I love my hard copies and I'm not short of problems with my net connection, not to mention the speeds I am getting are inadequate for downloading more than 1.5GB at a time, so it's nice to just hop into a store during the January sales or when there's a bit of money begging to be spent and pick up a hardcopy, not only can I be sure my data is safe but I know it wont take a day and a night to get started and I can remove it without fear of a big download when I consider a re-play. And of course, as useless as it may be, a manual, made out of REAL PAPER! ...yeah. I guess if hard copies ever came to an end, I would do alot less gaming. Nice to see the 'Steam Wallet' though genuinely ingenious.
Until my connection gets 'alot' faster i'll be buying boxed. When I install a game like l4d2 on disk it takes long enough to update on steam, f**k having to download the whole thing and then their's all the rest of my games......something like fear 2 is huge ! When I can download a 12gb game at the speed that it comes off the disk and it's cheaper than buying boxed then i'll go digital. Edit: Although I do want to play that Lara croft guardian of light game that's out soon and thats digital only so i'll have to make an exception.
I still buy boxed games, I like having the disc and the connection at my university is spotty when it comes to speed
