What Could Be
Picture this: Instead of physically going to a store, all you have to do is go to, say, GameStop.com, pay $50 through your PayPal account, and download a game - any game. Like always, GameStop earns a profit, the publisher gets a return on its investment and the developer gets what's left over. However, shelf space here is a thing of the past: Every game ever released may be purchased from this one website. It's an infinite game selection, no longer limited by how difficult it is to "track down" a game, but only by what you feel like playing. And this world might exist sooner than you think.
Why? Because the contemporary middleman is slowly but surely slipping into irrelevance. For example, take the music industry: While the lumbering record giants of old are struggling to stay in the black, iTunes reached its 3 billionth song download after being available for slightly over four years. Groups like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have recently made the decision to go without record labels, with the former initially digitally distributing its new album, In Rainbows, for a price decided on by each individual customer. This kind of extremism has yet to be seen in the game industry, but there are tremors, like Valve's use of its Steam application to toy with digital distribution. In recent years, the company has even started allowing outside developers and publishers to distribute their games through the service. Doug Lombardi, Valve's Director of Marketing, doesn't see it as a replacement for retail, however; in an interview with Computer and Video Games, he called the much-discussed takeover of digital distribution a "myth" and went on to say, "Online is just another sales channel and all outlets benefit from a title being widely available and marketed to as many people as possible."
Digital Independence
For years, independent developers of all kinds have used digital distribution to their advantage; Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya has been releasing his games as freeware on the internet since 1999, and in 2004 released Cave Story after developing it alone for over five years. When asked if he would consider going into commercial development, he said, "If I were to get into commercial development, I worry that I might not be able to create things the way I want to." On the other hand, developer The Behemoth got its start when Dan Paladin and Tom Fulp - the two guys behind the Newgrounds smash-hit Alien Hominid - teamed up with co-worker John Baez to develop a full version of the game for consoles. Baez told Gamasutra in 2006 that pitching the game to publishers was made easier by its Newgrounds counterpart's continued popularity. "It really made us believe that even though people really aren't playing 2D side scrollers anymore, there still might be a market for it."
