What I Want in Downloadable Games

With all of the platforms now offering some form of downloadable games and the PC and PS3 actually offering full games in online stores, I thought I should put up my wish-list for what I want in my downloadable games. This is NOT a list of what kind of game I want to play, but rather what kind of features I want to see overall.

• Games should be storable on external storage, whether on a USB HD, thumbdrive, SD card, or whatever. I don’t want to worry about having to re-download stuff all the time. If I have to move stuff back and forth between internal and external storage, I suppose I can live with that given USB’s speed limitations. But if they can be launched from the external storage, then they definitely should be.

• Downloadable games should be cheaper than disc-based games. Since there will be no competition between what “stores” actually sell the game, the fact that the game is being delivered directly from publisher to user with no manufacturing costs and no supply chain to worry about should theoretically bring the price to deliver these games to us down a fair amount. Of course, with what is surely going to be only a few distributors, most likely the prices will remain constant as the distributors essentially just “price fix” the games, instead of actually competing with each other on price. This will come despite the fact that downloadable games will probably have 100% depreciation the second you purchase them.

• Which brings me to my next point that downloadable games should have the same features as regular boxed games. What I mean is that you should be able to move these games from one place to another with relative ease. I don’t mean that they should be completely DRM-free, but that you should be able to de-authorize your game on one place and re-authorize it somewhere else on another machine.

• Similarly, games should not be tied to a machine or an account. I don’t mean that they should never be associated with a machine or an account, but that you should be able to decouple it and associate it with another machine and/or account. You’d essentially then have an unplayable “package” that requires some kind of key to re-authorize before it can be played. This would essentially allow people to lend, rent, and sell “used” games the same way that people can now.

I realize that there is basically no chance of any of this happening, but before we move to a completely download-based system, whether in the next generation or the following, I thought it’d be good to get a wish-list up, just in case anyone is listening.