GameStop Expands Digital Storefront for PC Games, Xbox 360 Coming Soon
Currently, the company is selling digital PC games and offering time-limited demos of certain titles, but eventually plans to offer Xbox 360 games and DLC. For the Xbox 360, customers will be emailed a code to redeem on the Xbox Live Marketplace. GameStop retail stores have already been selling some Xbox 360 digital content.
On the PC side, GameStop is selling Steamworks titles like Civilization V, while other titles will be directly downloaded through a partnership with Real Networks. The current selection is quite small and currently available in the US only.
Microsoft will also be re-launching its digital storefront as a web-based service, ditching the Games for Windows Live client in favor of a site later this month.-
Haxim
replyWhy do they even bother. Steam is the digital marketplace. Anyone else is guaranteed to fail miserably.
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its a strange thing, but in this case i think that lack of competition is not entirely a bad thing. noone wants to have 15 different digital distro programs running on their pc, having to keep up with all that shit. steam is great, it works well and its got the reputation. pretty much everyone has the opportunity to make money on steam too, this clamouring for the "next steam" is kind of pointless. i dont know why gamestop is set on doing this, they dont even sell PC games anymore in any quantity or with any serious effort in marketing.
there is plenty of room for console DD services because, as of now, there are only the manufacturers ones, but on the PC i am perfectly happy with steam being the only one that really matters and maybe a little Impulse or something on the side, aside from the handful of DRM free services like D2D. And of course GOG is a bit of a niche thing. -
"Valve basically owns the gaming market"
They basically own the Digital Distribution market, sure. And I know I'll catch shit from the "competition is good" crowd but if PC gaming because Steam at some point (i.e., retail dies but the PC thrives because of Steam) then I'd be fine with that.
"They should just make their OS"
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Yeah, let me throw out all the stuff you get with Windows so that I can run a gaming-only OS. I would "dual boot" between DOS and Windows back in the day (technically wasn't dual booting since Windows ran on top of DOS but I did have a customized autoexec.bat to pick between the two) and I have no desire to go back there. That's about as dumb as the idea of booting the game off of the disc.
OK, sorry, it's not that the idea is stupid or dumb, it's just that it's not very well thought out. Lots of people have had these same ideas and the reason they don't exist is because they've thought them through and not acted on them.
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