See, I reckon you've answered your own question there. Consumer. That's what people do now, they consume media - be it TV, film, music or games. It's about getting it done and moving on to the next one - look at all the retail space for pre-owned games. It's because a) people aren't interested in a game once it's completed b) people are interested in saving a couple of quid on a pre-owned game because they'll trade it back in once they've done with it. Woo, 100% complete with all achievements - now let's use it to get £15 off the new CoD... which I'll trade in against something else once I've 100%ed that with 94th level prestige, yippee!ZOM wrote:I really never understood how a consumer can support the shit that's going on with digital distribution, and yet there are many that do.
The model, which we are moving towards with "the cloud" and already have to an extent with PC gaming, is about consumption rather than ownership. You already have it with things like Spotify - listen to whatever music (within the confines of the library) you like, whenever and wherever you like for a monthly fee... but it's not yours. You can only have it as long as the service is there. We saw with the Playstation Network outage of less than a month that people are already tragically dependent on this sort of thing and go mental when it goes down. Imagine if that was the only way to play games - bit of a serious flaw, that.
If everything heads that way, then the only way for future generations to enjoy the games would be if the system continues to propagate them - or through "piracy" making available a game which no-one has an interest in re-publishing (why does that sound familiar....).
