Yet more digital distribution insanity

Continuing the saga of me buying more games than I can play for minuscule prices, today I nabbed the relatively unknown shooter Section 8 for a grand total of $12.50 off of Direct2Drive. Nor is this a two year old game like the last two I grabbed- Section 8 released to an unfortunate amount of apathy back in September of this year for $49.99, or $10 more than that if for some reason you wanted it on XBox 360.

So to recap, in this last week, I nabbed three somewhat obscure, but quality games for under $20, just by keeping on top of sales. Best of all, I never even had to come into contact with the horror that is buying games in an actual store from the flesh and grease beings that inhabit those despicable spaces. No, instead they are delivered, byte by byte, directly to the comfort of my room. At this rate I'll never have to pay full price, or submit to the indignity of EB Games ever again.

And even better, Games for Windows Live just got into the digital distribution scene this week. Now I don't share many people's pathological hatred for GFWL, but I'm not a particular fan of the service either so I don't expect to making extensive use of it. This is still good news however, because it means even more competition between digital distributers, and thus lower prices all around. It also shows some long overdue interest in PC gaming on Microsoft's part, and this is certainly a good thing- just so long as they don't try to turn the PC into a differently shaped XBox.

In other news, I continue to marvel at the myth that PC gaming is prohibitively expensive. I just picked up enough gaming material for two months at the very least, for about a third of what a new console title costs. Now of course none of these titles are brand new, so a person could argue that the used software sales of the consoles are something of a counterpoint to this. The problem with that is that used games are physical copies. This means that

1) somebody had to buy the game,

2) somebody had to sell it to

3) a store near you.

In short it means you'll probably have pretty good luck finding mainstream titles from a year or two ago, but less luck with the obscure stuff. Now if mainstream is how you roll, that's great, but there's a lot of really interesting titles that are less than well known. With used games, you might get lucky, and you might not.

With digital distribution you're almost certain to find pretty much all of the more recent niche titles because they do very well on Steam, Impulse and their ilk, and you'll be able to find them there permanently. And for really, really cheap.