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silveradept[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]
There's a worrying amount of consolidation going on in how you can obtain games, which is paradoxically happening at the same time that game companies are trying very hard not to play nice with each other. Well, it's paradoxical if you take it in isolation, rather than seeing it as the video game industry doing what other digital media groups and platforms have been doing over the last decade or so.
In the era of disk, cartridge, and disc softare, when these things were being sold new, rather than in stores that are also selling things like the RetroN to play the cartridges and discs with, there were several selections of stores that new software and games could b purchased from. Usually by a visit to the local strip mall or mall complex, where one could peruse mostly the same selection from any number of retailers, like the Electronics Botique, Babbage's, and GameStop. In addition, of course, to the electronics departments of various department stores, like Target, Fred Meyer, or Sears. A very early memory of mine is seeing the Nintendo Entertainnent System in a glass case in the small electronics, toys, and games section, right nexxt to where the portrait studio was. The machine itself was in demo mode, where the machine would reset itself every five minutes, for a game like Excitebike, which wasn't necessarily a game I was interested in, but I definitely was interested in the console itself. I'd get one, eventually, when I was older, with peripherals and games, at a garage sale, when the hot consoles were the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis systems.
You could talk about mall bookstores and various chains of those as well, like B. Dalton, or video rental store chains, like Blockbuster (who also did video game rentals), that were eventually eaten by bigger conglomerations, like Borders, or whose model was eaten nearly completely by a company like Netflix. Nowadays, Redbox does what Blockbuster did, including the game rentals, since just about every console at this point uses an optical disc, but they do it in the real estate that the model can sustain, which is a near-ubiquity of small boxes near where people would otherwise be. And even then, they're still competing with services like Netflix. And are getting into the same problem that public libraries are, when things are released solely for a particular platform, as a digital object only, and with no plans to ever put it on a disc and release it more widely. (We'll talk more about the situation of digital-only distribution in a later post. I'm not a fan, for a few different reasons.)
The advent of the World Wide Web made a lot of brick-and-mortar stores unable to compete with the idea of ordering from the comfort of home and having it delivered to your house, instead of having to go out and get it, and because of the way that taxation worked (and still works) for a lot of jurisdictions, products bought online can be cheaper, even with shipping costs, than products bought from a local retailer. In a culture that is obsessed with spending the least on a product, or for people who are caught by the ramifications of Samuel Vines' Boots Theory, which have the potential to become a "For Want of a Nail" situation, price is often the first, last, and sole criterion for determining whether a product or service is going to get bought. Given the margins available for games and consoles, it's no surprise that many avenues of getting games disappeared, bought out by a more successful competitor, or the available games suddenly became a small selection of carefully-curated AAA games in the department for each of the various systems that might be popular. (You can argue that this was always the case, even when the game stores were more numerous, and you would be right, frankly, but the illusion of choice vanished quickly for many media outlets, leaving us in the situation we are currently in.) Those places that survived and continue to sell media diversified heavily into the goods and accessories department, so much so that the games and systems moved to the walls of any given store space so as to merchandise the merchandise more effectively and possibly get some additional sales from people who are fans of the games and want to say so in their apparel and accessories choices. This is in the time where Amazon doesn't yet exist as the store of everything, but the writing is on the wall once you start looking at how easily they handled the sales of print books and shipped them to people.
At the same time that stores are drying up, so are PC game sales, at least how I perceived it. They never disappear from game stores, but they're usually in the same space with the bargain used games of the last console or the games that everyone has one of, played for a minute, decided it was boring, (or, in the case of so many licensed sports games, it had come out with the new year version) and traded it in for some small amount of store credit. Which is not to say that it disappears, because it doesn't, but a lot of the games that are coming out that people talk about are things that are only for consoles. After Duke Nukem 3D, really, 3D Realms fades out of the consciousness, and it'll be several years before id produces Doom 3, although they'll put out Quake II, III, IV, and a few other games. Sierra will distribute a game called Half-Life from a little-known studio by the name of Valve, whose conceit is that it is a first-person shooter game told without cutscenes, so the player experiences the entirety of the game from the perspective of the protagonist. Blizzard (before Activision eats it) puts out two wildly successful real-time strategy (RTS) series, WarCraft and StarCraft, and Westwood (before it gets eaten by Electronic Arts) puts out the Command And Conquer series of RTS.
You'll notice a pattern here. If you want to play an FPS or an RTS, and especially if you want to play multiplayer with or against your friends on your local area network (or your university Internet connection), you're still gaming on a PC. Halo: Combat Evolved won't appear until the Microsoft XBox arrives on the scene, at which point console FPS explodes as a genre, since someone has shown it to be done. (Halo also has a PC release soon after it debuts as an XBox flagship title, believe it or not, but most people don't play it on a PC. At least, not until it comes in a bundle on Steam, but again, we're getting ahead of ourselves.) Just about everything else, genre-wise, has jumped to consoles, and the infrastructure of gaming jumps to support them and provide software for them. Which, in turn, sparks a new generation of console wars, but this time, it's Sony and Microsoft going at it with each other, rather than Nintendo and Sega. (Sega will eventually fold up, as a company, despite having released a beauty of a machine called the Dreamcast, and having built many successful arcade boards and machines around the world.) One of the consequences of this, along with the Web, though, is that a console game is a console game is a console game, and you can get a console game from anywhere, and it will be the same thing, and so price, once again, becomes the thing that determines where a thing is bought from, and that spells near-certain doom for most places when Amazon enters the available space, at least for the physical side of game distribution and development.
There's one other aspect that is going to eat what crumbs are left when Amazon is done gorging itself on the market, so tomorrow, we'll talk about digital distribution.
There's a worrying amount of consolidation going on in how you can obtain games, which is paradoxically happening at the same time that game companies are trying very hard not to play nice with each other. Well, it's paradoxical if you take it in isolation, rather than seeing it as the video game industry doing what other digital media groups and platforms have been doing over the last decade or so.
In the era of disk, cartridge, and disc softare, when these things were being sold new, rather than in stores that are also selling things like the RetroN to play the cartridges and discs with, there were several selections of stores that new software and games could b purchased from. Usually by a visit to the local strip mall or mall complex, where one could peruse mostly the same selection from any number of retailers, like the Electronics Botique, Babbage's, and GameStop. In addition, of course, to the electronics departments of various department stores, like Target, Fred Meyer, or Sears. A very early memory of mine is seeing the Nintendo Entertainnent System in a glass case in the small electronics, toys, and games section, right nexxt to where the portrait studio was. The machine itself was in demo mode, where the machine would reset itself every five minutes, for a game like Excitebike, which wasn't necessarily a game I was interested in, but I definitely was interested in the console itself. I'd get one, eventually, when I was older, with peripherals and games, at a garage sale, when the hot consoles were the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis systems.
You could talk about mall bookstores and various chains of those as well, like B. Dalton, or video rental store chains, like Blockbuster (who also did video game rentals), that were eventually eaten by bigger conglomerations, like Borders, or whose model was eaten nearly completely by a company like Netflix. Nowadays, Redbox does what Blockbuster did, including the game rentals, since just about every console at this point uses an optical disc, but they do it in the real estate that the model can sustain, which is a near-ubiquity of small boxes near where people would otherwise be. And even then, they're still competing with services like Netflix. And are getting into the same problem that public libraries are, when things are released solely for a particular platform, as a digital object only, and with no plans to ever put it on a disc and release it more widely. (We'll talk more about the situation of digital-only distribution in a later post. I'm not a fan, for a few different reasons.)
The advent of the World Wide Web made a lot of brick-and-mortar stores unable to compete with the idea of ordering from the comfort of home and having it delivered to your house, instead of having to go out and get it, and because of the way that taxation worked (and still works) for a lot of jurisdictions, products bought online can be cheaper, even with shipping costs, than products bought from a local retailer. In a culture that is obsessed with spending the least on a product, or for people who are caught by the ramifications of Samuel Vines' Boots Theory, which have the potential to become a "For Want of a Nail" situation, price is often the first, last, and sole criterion for determining whether a product or service is going to get bought. Given the margins available for games and consoles, it's no surprise that many avenues of getting games disappeared, bought out by a more successful competitor, or the available games suddenly became a small selection of carefully-curated AAA games in the department for each of the various systems that might be popular. (You can argue that this was always the case, even when the game stores were more numerous, and you would be right, frankly, but the illusion of choice vanished quickly for many media outlets, leaving us in the situation we are currently in.) Those places that survived and continue to sell media diversified heavily into the goods and accessories department, so much so that the games and systems moved to the walls of any given store space so as to merchandise the merchandise more effectively and possibly get some additional sales from people who are fans of the games and want to say so in their apparel and accessories choices. This is in the time where Amazon doesn't yet exist as the store of everything, but the writing is on the wall once you start looking at how easily they handled the sales of print books and shipped them to people.
At the same time that stores are drying up, so are PC game sales, at least how I perceived it. They never disappear from game stores, but they're usually in the same space with the bargain used games of the last console or the games that everyone has one of, played for a minute, decided it was boring, (or, in the case of so many licensed sports games, it had come out with the new year version) and traded it in for some small amount of store credit. Which is not to say that it disappears, because it doesn't, but a lot of the games that are coming out that people talk about are things that are only for consoles. After Duke Nukem 3D, really, 3D Realms fades out of the consciousness, and it'll be several years before id produces Doom 3, although they'll put out Quake II, III, IV, and a few other games. Sierra will distribute a game called Half-Life from a little-known studio by the name of Valve, whose conceit is that it is a first-person shooter game told without cutscenes, so the player experiences the entirety of the game from the perspective of the protagonist. Blizzard (before Activision eats it) puts out two wildly successful real-time strategy (RTS) series, WarCraft and StarCraft, and Westwood (before it gets eaten by Electronic Arts) puts out the Command And Conquer series of RTS.
You'll notice a pattern here. If you want to play an FPS or an RTS, and especially if you want to play multiplayer with or against your friends on your local area network (or your university Internet connection), you're still gaming on a PC. Halo: Combat Evolved won't appear until the Microsoft XBox arrives on the scene, at which point console FPS explodes as a genre, since someone has shown it to be done. (Halo also has a PC release soon after it debuts as an XBox flagship title, believe it or not, but most people don't play it on a PC. At least, not until it comes in a bundle on Steam, but again, we're getting ahead of ourselves.) Just about everything else, genre-wise, has jumped to consoles, and the infrastructure of gaming jumps to support them and provide software for them. Which, in turn, sparks a new generation of console wars, but this time, it's Sony and Microsoft going at it with each other, rather than Nintendo and Sega. (Sega will eventually fold up, as a company, despite having released a beauty of a machine called the Dreamcast, and having built many successful arcade boards and machines around the world.) One of the consequences of this, along with the Web, though, is that a console game is a console game is a console game, and you can get a console game from anywhere, and it will be the same thing, and so price, once again, becomes the thing that determines where a thing is bought from, and that spells near-certain doom for most places when Amazon enters the available space, at least for the physical side of game distribution and development.
There's one other aspect that is going to eat what crumbs are left when Amazon is done gorging itself on the market, so tomorrow, we'll talk about digital distribution.
