Chris Petrovic, GM of GameStop Digital Ventures, talked during the GamesBeat conference about the difference between Silicon Valley in attitude towards games and places like midwest and southeast America. Also, while his company has made a lot off the used game trade over the years, he argues that retail also serves an important function with digital sales as well.
“There’s a huge delta between early adopters and the mass market. I think it’s much larger than any of us are willing to acknowledge sometimes, because it just isn’t a fun story,” he said. “You think about how much longer people hold on to their stuff that they’ve invested a lot of money in. You realize that folks are value-oriented, folks are not like us, necessarily, the ones waiting in line to get things on day one. They have kids at home, they don’t want to spend as much money as a new product would cost.”
“Even though there may be an assumption that more games will be delivered digitally, you still need an endpoint device,” he said. “The other thing that we realize, too, is that 70 percent of purchases of digital product that are made in our stores involve some other form of payment besides a credit card. So when you think about all of the other ways that you could pay for stuff, when the purely digital platforms are limited to a credit card as the primary means . . . We have an ecosystem that’s very unique in terms of unlocking value that others can’t, and we do that with and for our partners as well as for our own digital platforms.”
Source: GamesBeat
