The End of the Disc?

So I’m sitting here wondering why on earth people keep harassing me at work, the bosses telling me to ask customers “If they want help?” Surely, If you go into a game shop (or any shop come to think of it) you don’t want to be harassed by a member of the staff. If you need help you can ask someone, but why would you want a staff member hired just to bother YOU? Is this how all game shops are, or is it just the bad ones?

Other things are playing on my mind, like what is the future of gaming; I have read a brief article (more of an open letter to the public) asking whether the next generation of gaming consoles will kill the disc. A good question, but it won’t happen, and if it does it wouldn’t be cool. Take for example games which you can download already on the Xbox dashboard. They charge the full retail price like it was a box on a shelf. Now £24.99 for Alan Wake may be well priced, but why is it not cheaper then the disc variant?? Think about it; think about the manufacturing costs for the plastics needed for both the box and the disc. Imagine the expense of the huge machines required to make those things, the hundreds of man hours spent to produce the damn thing, not to mention a huge international infrastructure used to deliver them from different countries to your local shop. I don’t even want to think about the environmental cost, and to top it all off they have to be sold at a marked up price for the shops to make a profit. With all of this taken into account it is priced at exactly the same amount as a game which is downloaded directly to you, Why?? The downloaded version needs no physical apparition; it doesn’t need to be manually delivered by boat, train or lorry, so why does it cost the same? It’s because they assume YOU are stupid.

Frankly I think most people would rather just go to a shop and have a real copy, so they have the ability to trade or sell in the future, And why not???
Of course the well informed gamer would have noticed by now the back handed techniques used by certain companies to stop the reselling of our own games, VIP or sort codes for example, which once used to make certain games unable to play online or even at all. This is only avoided if the new owner pays for the privilege.

Would you want to live in a world where cars are restricted just because you are the second or third owner, and you had to pay a good chunk of what you have already spent just so you can use all of the cars functions?? Sure you can’t go without brakes but do you really need air bags?!?!

Maybe this and the “can I help you?” mentally only comes about when people become too lazy and apathetic towards life. I don’t know what the point of this article is. Maybe it is to help people make informed decisions. If we do nothing and keep buying this crap it will soon become the norm. Stop it while YOU can.

Games: Alan Wake, Platforms: Xbox 360, Genres: Adventure, Publishers: Microsoft, Developers: Microsoft