If you’re not marketing your games through digital means, you re missing out on the fastest growing market in gaming.
A recent editorial in IndustryGamers raised the specter in context of GameStop and their slow-to-market digital efforts, offering a reminder once again that being among the first movers in the digital distribution space is extremely important in marketing games.
“I think that they are too far behind digital services like Xbox Live. Over 70 percent of content sales happens on the consoles,” Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan Securities told IndustryGamers. “If you have a 360, you don’t need an aggregator, since Microsoft won’t let you go to the Internet and download content anyway. This has been part of Microsoft’s strategy from the beginning: THEY want to be the aggregator for their console, and Sony will follow suit with PSN. The Wii Plus (HD) will likely have a hard drive, and the Wii Channel will be the aggregator there. Bottom line, unless the console guys open a gateway to the Internet, GameStop has no place as an aggregator.”
Of course, there will be a market for physical game media in the future, and GameStop may dominate that market forever. But the importance of marketing your games and having them available on digital distribution cannot be discounted, because while the market may be small right now, things are ramping up quickly.
And if you have any doubts, just ask yourself, when was the last time you strolled into a record store to buy your music
