There really is something to be said about being the first to the dance. I’m pretty sure we can all agree that Steam was the first big digital distribution service for video games, and I also think we can all agree that it was something of a success. But how big a success? Stardock, which owns the Impulse distribution service (and published Sins of a Solar Empire), believes that Steam enjoys 70 percent market share of the digital distribution business.
It sounds impressive, and it is, but it’s important to recognize that digital distribution is still in its infancy. In other words, Valve has a 70 percent hold on a not-that-big-yet business.
Not that digital distribution isn’t the future. I rated the Sony PSP Go so highly partially because it represents a necessary step forward in the way in which we buy games. (I tell you what I’m not looking forward to today: walking into a GameStop, getting into a “conversation” with the guy there, when all I want is a copy of Assassin’s Creed II. I still haven’t forgiven Best Buy for violating my Civil Rights, so I’m not going giving the ol’ blue shirts any of my business. Unless there’s some indie video game store in Manhattan that I’m not aware of, it’s going to have to be GameStop. Shudder.) That Sony decided to nearly ruin it by only including an 802.11 chipset is another matter entirely.
Xbox Live has shown that you can distribute full, current-gen games to a console crowd, and PSN and Virtual Console prove that people are cool with the idea of buying and downloading older games to local storage. The days when video game = shiny disc are numbered.
I’m only now realizing there wasn’t really a point to these past few words, just reiterating, for the 100th time, that I’m fully prepared for an all-digital future.
I try to support Stardock whenever I can. If Steam and Impulse are selling the same title, I buy it on Impulse. Competition is good for all of us!
They’ve done a great job with Steam, so I can see why they’re on top. Aside from the constant ads, I do really appreciate being able to have one application to manage and launch my games, and for the ones that I’ve gotten from Steam I like the fact that it handles all the updates and patches. I almost ordered Borderlands from Amazon, but then remembered that not only could I get it faster from Steam, it would also probably play faster and be less of a hassle if I just had the digital version. Of course there are downsides, like not being able to give the game to a friend, but it is very convenient.
Barnes & Noble PR department tells me “nook” is lowercased in all cases and there is no “the” before the word, just “nook” — got that Brad Stone?
Dear Brad and David Pogue and John Markoff and Jenny Lee and Ashlee Vance and Vindu Goel and Brad Pitt and Eric Taub and Ms Cain Miller and Greg Cowles and Motoko Rich and Sam Tannenhaus at the New York Times:
I asked Barnes & Noble’s PR dept corporate communications dept Ms Carolyn Brown [cbrown@bn.com] and she told me in no uncertain times that nook is lowercased, always, except when it is the first word in sentence, of course, and that it does not take a “the” before it.
She wrote to me when I asked whether USA newspapers and editors and bloggers should CAP or lowercase the word “nook” — and she replied:
“It is all lowercase nook and just nook not the nook.”
Presumably that’s not including ALL digital distribution, rapidshare, torrents, etc…? How does Steam compare with the Pirate Bay’s game section?
”It is lower case nook, not the Nook.”
SAYS MARY ellen keating at BN
dear PR dept BNm,
Ms Keating
i am a reporter in Taiwan. i need to find out the proper way to spell
nook. it is uppercase or lowercase. the logo is “nook”, but all USA
newspapers call it the Nook. It should be the nook. The Taiwan
newspapers call it the nook. so do I. I am an editor. What the BN
response to this: should nook be CAPPED for first letter N or
lowercased, yes or no? please ASAP RSVp, danny