Playdead, the ingenious development team behind Limbo has shared their distaste for the way retailers are handling games.
In an interview with Eurogamer, developer boss Dino Patti discussed how “broken” he feels the retail model is and has been for some time, citing the reluctance to move towards a disc-free future.
There will be discs for a long time from now, but the world has adopted download. When your mum and dad start to download things, that’s when it’s everybody who does it. So many publishers are pushing [discs] and there are so many channels which just won’t die easily. In terms of money it’s still bigger than download. There are still a lot of people who buy their games that way. It still makes a better presence.
Driving discs in a big van all over the world is really inefficient. I don’t understand how anyone can make money out of this. Driving a truck to Japan just to get it delivered to people when they can get it from the net? Hopefully the new consoles will embrace the download space even more.
Patti went on to point out the fact that the “plug in and play” model of the past is no more, as video game consoles begin to function more and more like PCs.
I hate to have the disc myself. I only buy the disc if I want a console game, but everything else I download from Steam. And all the new games today also need to be installed. Why did I get a console if the games need to be installed? That really sucks. That’s a PC.
It should be more like plug and play. The first consoles were cartridges. When it takes one hour to install Gran Turismo 5? I don’t know. Obviously it improves performance, but they should be able to build consoles with better performance from the disc drive.
Playdead’s next title will be a download-only game and is said to be even “crazier” than Limbo.
