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Despite the growing importance of digital distribution in gaming, physical media will still be around for another five to ten years – or so believes Sean Spector co-founder of GameFly.
“I think that the disc lives for five or ten years from now,” said Spector, speaking to VideoGamer.com during a recent visit to London.
“I don’t have a crystal ball, but that’s my hunch. My hunch is that there will be another generation of consoles that will require physical media, maybe not exclusively – like with Xbox LIVE, you can download old games. I think it will be more of a hybrid, digital and disc. Which is kind of where we position ourselves, to be a hybrid.
“As that transition takes time some people will do both, some people will do one or the other. And we want to be able to facilitate both.”
GameFly recently soft-launched in the UK, having bought Direct2Drive from IGN at the end of last year. The firm now offers digital downloads for over 230 games, and plans to offer over 1000 titles by Christmas.
At present Spector says there are no plans to emulate GameFly’s US rental service, which sends out physical games in a similar manner to LoveFilm. GameFly may eventually sell game discs over here, however.
Either way, Spector maintains that it will take time for gamers to let go of hard media:
“It never happens overnight. People like to think that it does, and they like to write about that it’s going to happen overnight – but it never does. The music business in the States, when Gamefly started, was a $20bn a year business, physical CD sales. Now it’s and $7bn or $8bn business. So it’s definitely come down, but it hasn’t gone away.
“Certainly the technology is there to make it go away, but consumers’ behaviour hasn’t changed 100 per cent yet. I think it takes a couple of generations to happen: My daughters are 9 and 12 – they’ve never bought a CD, and they probably never will. But they’re 9 and 12, right? They’re not 25, 30, 44. So things take time.”
GameFly’s new client app is available here.
