In a political season full of the usual misinformation, misunderstandings and outright lies, it’s not surprising that Gamestop’s Bob McKenzie would say:
We’re not saying we won’t be impacted at all by digital distribution, but the average customer isn’t going to have the patience for a 72-hour download for a game on their system
I download a review copy of Spore earlier this week. It took less than three hours. So either Mr. McKenzie is still on dial-up or he knows nothing about digital distribution.
It does depend on the volume of people and the server. For example, trying to download a Crysis demo a few days ago, off some servers, because of either download caps or other people, it was going at 200kbps, 100x slower than my internet and going to take over 24hours.
However, I would assume, that if you are paying for anything, the download speed will be as fast as, so yeah, it is a bit stupid his comment.
Always paying for something. And I’ve never had any paid download take more than five hours.
If you are using torrents then I expect your experience will vary, but I have no interest in that sort of thing.
At first I thought he was talking about dial-up, but the article references “speed limitations of most broadband solutions” before his answer, so that means he is dumb.
OR he’s talking about one huge m-f’in game!!
I think the last time I pulled Bioshock down from Steam it took less than an hour. Just saying…
Clearly Mr. McKenzie is on crack.
If DRM keeps going down the road that has been paved by EA, then only gamers with constant internet connections will even be able to play PC games at all, so I see digital distribution being very viable. Nevertheless, on the broadband connection I currently use I have to wait at least 24 hours for a game to download over Steam, (that’s TF2, UT3, etc… not a one time issue).
I guess “broadband” means different things to different people. I consider cable to be true “broadband,” but not DSL (“somewhat faster than dial-up”).
He’s right; I don’t have the patience (or the hard drive space) for a 72-hour download. Nor do I have a particular aversion to purchasing discs at retail. Of course, GameStop still has to compete on price and availability just like everybody else.
No he’s just hoping that the three people who listen to the CEO of a game company when making their game purchase decisions will decide to go into the store rather than try digital downloads and see how convenient they are.
@Roland: Clearly I’m being too subtle with my snarky comments. What I mean is that if downloads really did take 72-hours (which they don’t), I’d prefer to go to a store (which probably wouldn’t be a GameStop store because their prices and selection aren’t competitive).
Unfortunately, the stores around here don’t stock many PC games.