Eurogamer.net Podcast #30

By Tom Bramwell Published 3 August, 2010

With special guests Andy Payne and Pat Garratt.

We simply won't stop casting pod for your pleasure. Still reeling from the treacherous No Toms edition of the show two weeks ago, editor Tom Bramwell this week cleared the decks and brought in outside help for what we're calling the No Staff edition - starring Brammers, Mastertronic MD Andy Payne and VG247 editor Patrick Garratt.

Stream the Eurogamer.net Podcast:

Naturally none of us has been playing anything current, so this week we have a good old jibber jabber about some of the games of, well, 2008. Patrick has been playing Fable II and Tom has been playing Fallout 3, so there's lots of excitement about decapitation, cross-dressing and the dichotomy of good and evil.

Perhaps the highlight though - as you might expect for three men who spend most of their days trying to explain how money comes out of the internet - is a long discussion about digital distribution and some of the inconvenient realities of it.

We talk about tax, for example, and Andy - who is also a leader in Get Games, a joint venture between Mastertronic and Eurogamer - talks about the shift away from bricks-and-mortar game sales and how the High Street must refashion itself to remain relevant.

Of course that's not all. We also discuss important events of the day, such as the R4 cartridge ban, worldwide sales of PS3 and Xbox 360, Microsoft defending the Kinect price, and, inevitably, the news that you could possibly be called upon to teach Rio Ferdinand how to play Halo.

We also talk about shelves.

In unprecedented scenes, we also have DUAL GUEST HYPHENATION for the first and possibly last time as we give away a code for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - Onslaught on Xbox Live.

Background reading!

Astonishing, face-shattering breakthroughs with every download - that's the Eurogamer.net Podcast. Thank you for supporting us for 30 episodes. Check back next Tuesday at 3pm for the return of honeymooner Ellie Gibson.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000. Follow him on Twitter.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (14) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • X201 #1 2 years ago

    Needs more seagulls

    Binmen > Person shouting down ally

  • kosigan #2 2 years ago

    Has Ellie never heard of Skype? I don't know, that girl's got no sense of commitment. :)

  • Mkwone #3 2 years ago

    I didn't know David Seaman knew about games?

  • billythekid #4 2 years ago

    Pat Garratt, shit I'm out of here. You ain't seen me, right!

  • pinebear #5 2 years ago

    Great industry discussion, thanks lads.

  • Er-El #6 2 years ago

    We definitely do need an open games platform. That was probably the first console war discussion I've listened to on a podcast that interested me.

  • HermitArcader #7 2 years ago

    Post deleted at 09:17:39 22-12-2011

  • Hunam #8 2 years ago

    Single console system would be pish. Lack of competition in hardware would mean slow moving updates and massive price hikes because they could charge what they want.

  • Er-El #9 2 years ago

    @Human
    I think you might have missed the point in an 'open' platform. An open platform wouldn't be a platform per se, but an open specification for other platforms to build on. In other words, it would mean more competition, not less.

  • kosigan #10 2 years ago

    A digital-distribution-only future worries me. Competition immediately ceases: if you can only buy a product from one place (PlayStation Store or XBox Live Marketplace), they can charge what they like - which will be full "recommended" retail price all the time. Downloading all games is not currently viable - games publishers would like it, as they could cut out the retailer and take the 40% that the retailers normally take (of RRP, which is where their room for discounting comes from); ISPs would not like it. With something like Final Fantasy XIII taking up 40GB on the PS3, there's your entire month's download limit gone if you're with someone like TalkTalk - and they are not alone in implementing download caps. At the average UK broadband speed of 3Mb/s, it would also take 30 hours to download it if you could. Then you'd need a hard drive big enough to store all these games that you're downloading; 250GB won't seem so big if you have to download everything.

    Obviously, this particular game is currently an extreme example (though games to tend to increase in size over time), but there are others that, on XBox 360, need more than 1 DVD, so more than about 6GB. Digital-only also changes the concept of "owing" a game - you wouldn't any more. Whenever the publisher decided to switch off access to that game, you would no longer be able to play it, as online authorisation is an inherent requirement of downloaded "content". It is in the publisher's interest for you to keep buying more games, which makes it a sound business principle to deactivate "old" games in order to force people into buying new ones. Anything that gets updated annually - sports titles and Call of Duty, for example - would fit right into this: in 2012, it's believable that you could only play FIFA 2012 and not FIFA 2011, as they'd pulled the plug.

    Download-only would, I believe, also do more to encourage piracy than to prevent it. There seems to be a prevailing belief amongst a portion of the population that, as data is not physical, it has no value; as it's not physical, nothing is being stolen, right? Just look at how much pirated stuff there is on the internet. Understandably, the developers who spend many months and lots of money creating these games feel otherwise - and I agree with them, being in a related business myself.

    Digital distribution may be the future, but I'm not so sure that it's going to be the piracy-free high-revenue utopia that the industry hopes it will.

    Rebuttals, anyone?

  • HermitArcader #11 2 years ago

    Post deleted at 09:17:39 22-12-2011

  • DAN.E.B #12 2 years ago

    Pat..............are you my friend?

  • carrotcake #13 2 years ago

    Wii does a good enough job at being a depository for downloaded classic games anyway.... shame it doesn't have sega saturn

  • KDR_11k #14 2 years ago

    Stop it with the cloud buzzword, cloud means outsourcing computation or storage to someone on the internet (especially with interactive interfaces, i.e. not sending off a batch job and getting the result back), it's not a replacement for "server". Steam is not a cloud by itself. Steam cloud acts as a remote data storage for your save files but the game buying and downloading stuff is a regular bunch of file servers and databases. The cloud part of OnLive is not that they sell games digitally but that they also provide a mainframe for you to use that software on, all you get is a terminal to access your virtual computer on the internet. Steam is a traditional data delivery, the software is downloaded to your local system and executed there with your own hardware.

    You know where the term personal computer comes from? From having the computer under/on your desk and doing computation locally instead of having a screen and keyboard connected to the big mainframe of your company/university. By using the cloud you actually no longer have a personal computer, you're more primitive than a freaking Commodore PET!
    Edited by KDR_11k at 05/08/10 @ 17:03