Where's that damn CD?

The quiet snap of a button launches a tray from the odd looking box on your desk. A long row of white CD sleeves stares upward, numbered but not labeled.

Flip through the drawer and you’ll find a wealth of gaming history. Diablo, Civilization II, Privateer II, Half-Life, TIE Fighter, F-18 Korea, Max Payne. Except Privateer II is missing a disk. Max Payne is missing a CD key.

In fact, the only game that is likely to make it to the next computer is Half-Life, and that’s because the words Valve, Steam, and Digital Distribution are essentially synonymous. Every gamer who has upgraded to a new computer knows the pain of realizing that the move means giving up all their old games with missing CDs.

Digital Distribution as a whole is a phenomenon that has been gaining ground over the past three years, largely in the independent games market. Back in 2006 I had the opportunity to interview Greg Costikyan, then in the process of founding Manifesto Games, a completely digital small-time publisher/distributor for independent game companies. His theory is simple: cut out the middleman, and everybody wins (except, obviously, the middleman).

Manifesto is not the only digital option available to gamers, however. PC Gamer, the long-time best selling PC games magazine, has booted up an online store, Gametap of course offers online subscription gaming to those who crave it, and Steam is more and more becoming an online emporium for major titles.

It’s not all sunshine and roses, however. There are a couple valid drawbacks that, along with the quiet power of retail, are keeping digital distribution from hitting a more mainstream audience.

First, nobody wants to download three-gigabyte games over a slow connection. Most gamers in today’s online world have DSL or Cable, if only to make sure they don’t get lagged out of their Battlefield 2142 server. But even basic DSL will eat 15 or 16 hours downloading a full-size game, and it makes regular surfing an agonizing experience in the meantime.

The second drawback is that console game sales make up an extremely large portion of the market, and to date, full-size console games live only on physical media, at least legally. Console makers will be reluctant to include a large enough hard drive to make digital distribution a realistic possibility anytime soon. Without the support of the console market, digital game distribution is unlikely to gain the momentum it needs to take a serious chunk out of retail.

Finally, downloading a game for several hours will bite into the instant gratification that drives a good portion of American sales. When you buy a game in the store, you take it home, plug it in, and if it’s on the PC you might have a ten minute install, but the game is almost always up and running inside a half-hour.

But complaints like these have the wonderful quality of being temporary problems. Limited bandwidth and connection speeds pose a problem in today’s environment, but it is rapidly disappearing as an obstacle. According to a 2006 Pew Internet study, 42% of Americans had high speed connections to their homes in March, and the number of connected homes is growing at an increasing rate. In short, dial-up internet is a relic of the past.

Like other technologies, hard drives are constantly dropping in price even as they increase in size. Sony’s high-end Playstation 3 boasts a 60 gigabyte hard drive, which won’t hold many full-capacity Blu-Ray disks, but it would make a perfectly decent go at holding several of today’s blockbuster titles. The PS3 also pushes the boundary lines between console and PC, with a built-in web browser and USB ports.

As connection speeds and console technologies increase, so will delivery. Nobody has yet figured out how to push enough of a game through the pipes fast enough to match standard disc install times, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. Valve’s client offering, Steam, boasts the ability to run single-player games before the download is complete. They push the engine through, and then start play as soon as the first level has been downloaded.

Just Monday Sir Richard Branson, the Virgin Air/Music/Games mega-tycoon announced development with Game Domain International on a 3D desktop client designed to distribute video games online in a way he calls as simple as iTunes. Imagine Second-Life as a video-game operating system, where each new digital block brings you a new genre of buyable games.

But current download wait times have hardly slowed the market. Already Gametap features 88 different titles, Steam offers 111, and the PC Gamer Online Store offers over a thousand titles ranging from Civilization IV to LEGO Chic Botique.

These online stores carry some powerful tools and incentives that traditional retail just can’t offer. Finding a game is as simple as searching for it. Shareware is back in style with publishers confident that stray CD keys won’t unlock by thousands of errant game disks; once again gamers can try before they buy.

Online services also cater to a new type of development: episodic games. The process of mastering, printing, and boxing thousands or hopefully millions of discs, although extremely efficient, can become prohibitive if it needs to be done too often. Releasing shorter, more frequent “episodes” of a game keeps the wait time smaller for gamers and the burden lighter on developers. But distributing new game content every year only really makes sense if it is done online.

Steam, more than any other service, defines the advanced features that will really make online distribution shine over traditional box retail. Buying a game on Steam is less like purchasing the software and more like purchasing the CD key; you tie the game to an account, and the game follows the account to any computer connected to the internet. This means that hunting for lost discs is a thing of the past. An internet connection and a password will activate anything previously bought. Steam also downloads updates in the background and applies them, the same way that Windows XP keeps itself updated.

As more services become more developed, gamers will be able to purchase games, play them anywhere, track statistics, and keep them updated, all without having to shuffle through dusty boxes or, heaven forbid, organize their shelves. And that is why digital distribution is the way of the future.