Gaming has been around a long time, as have many of us who enjoy games as a proper hobby. We’ve a great many changes and shifts in the gaming market over our many years, but one of the most significant is one that has been nearly all-encompassing yet hasn’t delivered on the industry’s most important promise to gamers. I don’t know hoow many of you remember, but right at the dawn of digital distribution, there was one big promise that all the big publishers were making as a justification for the shift: that it would make games cheaper across the board.

Now, after nearly 20 years and digital becoming the absolute dominant method for distributing and purchasing games, we can look around and see that that hasn’t exactly happened. Yes, there are digital sales all the time that you absolutely can take advantage of if you’re very patient. However, that doesn’t excuse the fact that prices for games at launch has increased since the days of the PS3 and Xbox 360, not the other way around like we were promised. Instead of the $40 or even $30 average price that the shift implicitly promised, we’ve seen games rise to $60, then $70 with $80 and even $90 on the horizon. Where the heck are those savings we were promised??

Gamers aren’t the only one’s asking these questions either. Industry veterans like Fallout co-creator Tim Cain have started talking about it too. As reported by GamesRadar+, Cain recently put out a vlog where he discussed the good and bad points of digital vs physical. He does reason that the money saved by not having to produce game boxes, cases, manuals and discs helped keep the price stable for a long while, but ultimately concluded that those savings were never passed along to consumers as was promised.

I’d say that the argument is entirely moot now that publishers are seeing fit to jack up prices however much and often as they want. As for ballooning development costs, I’d again argue that publishers and studios are doing it to themselves. After all, who exactly is asking them to risk it all on every title? Who’s asking them to budget hundreds of millions of dollars on these games? Only their upper management is.

We’ve seen it with the likes of Pokemon Z-A, for which Nintendo is currently under fire by the internet due to quality concerns, but which is also selling quite well. Games can and often do sell massively regardless of how much is spent to make them and how much people like us complain. Even then, the quality complaints are more about Nintendo charging the $70 for entry then asking for another $30 for the endgame and $15 to be able to play online than they are just pure budget.

Digital absolutely is convenient, but it has in no way saved us any money directly. That’s a promise that was never kept and is another reason why the adversarial relationship between gamers and large publishers/platform holders exists. Games have been and likely will always be just as expensive digitally as they are physically, that is, outside of patiently waiting for sales or waiting years to buy used physical copies.

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How do you feel about digital distribution for games? Do you feel that the promises surrounding it were kept? Are we better off with it than without?

Image by flickr user: wuestenigel (cc)