Nintendo Wii Fanboy

As much as I hated digital distribution in the beginning (I love buying CDs from my favorite artists), it IS better for the environment. :P

Except that a game with the same budget as Order of Ecclesia could be sold for much cheaper without manufacturing and packaging costs.

I really don't care if it's cheaper, I don't want to worry about a stupid hard drive crash, I don't want to worry about the death of the secondhand market since I NEVER buy new games, the list goes on.

I'm all for buying indie or shorter games through XBLA or Wiiware, like Braid or FF:CC:MLaaK, but this trend of full games as downloads only just...no. Stop.

Since consoles switched from carts to optical discs, manufacturing costs have plummeted. It doesn't add nearly the cost that some people seem to think it does.

Now retailer markups might be a different story, but there's an easy solution to that: Web store. A lot of Indies have done it (ex, Hamumu, IIRC), and it worked out fine. Total cost for the consumer for these is often $15 - $25. If fact, they probably could have gone for less, but for a long time the indie scene was operating under the assumption that $20 was just *the right price* to charge for a game (Just read through the forum archives at indiegamer.com).

And let's not forget those "Greatest Hits" lines: These companies routinely make money off of in-store manufactured discs at a cost to the consumer of only $20-$30. Granted, those games start at $50-$60 to make up for dev costs, but those are games with Gear of War-like development budgets. A 2D platformer wouldn't need nearly that kind of budget. And then there's the DS *carts* that make money at only about $35.

So bottom line, the common idea that putting a game on a disc instead of or in addition to WiiWare/XBLA/PSN would inflate the price by a significant amount (like going from $20 to $50) is an enormous load of shit.