Digital Distribution

I've often been somewhat annoyed by PC games always requiring players to have the CD or DVD present in the drive before allowing the game to be started. This is completely farcical and game companies can only get away with it because we've been conditioned through using consoles, where everything is read from the disc almost all the time. However, in PC games these days, the entire game is copied to the hard disk for faster access, so the game disc is not necessary. Being on the move, getting a game like Battlefield 2 started was a chore, because the disc always had to be located and inserted into the drive before the game would even run. This is ridiculous when considering that the game is mostly played on-line, meaning that the key can be checked for validity as much as EA wants.

Thankfully there seems to be a trend towards expelling this weak form of copy protection, especially with the growing popularity of digital distribution. If you have a valid and registered key, that's all you need, right? So the actual software itself should be readily available to you even if you don't have the disc to hand. Software registration is commonplace amongst other kinds of applications, because companies wouldn't expect users to have to insert a CD every time they wanted to use Photoshop for example. So it's nice to see games like Company of Heroes take this same approach and allow players to register the game and just play it without the need for the disc to constantly be in the drive.

With digital distribution coming to the forefront of game purchases, the requirement for physical discs is diminishing. As a good example, I recently purchased World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade and had it sent to my family in the UK. When it arrived, I was able to simply have the serial key sent via e-mail to me here in Japan, allowing me to register as having bought a copy on the World of Warcraft website and begin downloading the Burning Crusade client. Essentially, all I had really bought was the serial key and therefore the right to have the software on my PC, which is what it's really all about in the end.

In my particular case, digital downloads save a great deal of hassle, but of course it's not for everyone. One of the biggest drawbacks is in clients that require your PC to always be on-line and logged in to the distribution service, like Valve's Steam. For single-player games and people who are always on the move and like to play a few games on their laptop, this situation is not ideal. Furthermore, actually buying Burning Crusade from the website advertising the game as a download is far more expensive than buying a retail boxed copy - twice as much in fact.

Digital distribution needs to be made more friendly and a lot cheaper, but I'm looking forward to how this new technology will change the face of the industry in the years to come.