Digital distribution is growing in the video game industry by leaps and bounds. I’m in agreement with many analysts that brick-and-mortar stores have years of life left in them and actual packaged games with manuals and other inserts will be here for years to come.

However, it behooves people like myself who create game box & docs to stay abreast of what’s going on with “packaging” and “manuals” for digital game distribution. I keep a very close eye on game industry trends in terms of online documentation, and honestly, there’s not much out there yet other than PDFs.

As we move more into digital game distribution, I hope manuals will improve from the current PDF model. However, currently, most games that are solely digitally distributed aren’t those with big marketing budgets and therefore a very limited amount of time and money reserved for documentation and packaging.

My hope is as more triple-A titles are distributed online, publishers will want to create more robust online packaging. I think one of the main obstacles to this advance is to convince publishers it’s worth the money—that interactive, updatable, link-based box & docs are worthwhile and can add value and life to a product.

Links in online box & docs to other avenues of title monetization are probably one of the strongest arguments for robust online packaging. Dynamic “in-game” advertising added to online packaging and documentation is another revenue stream that could convince publishers to move in this direction.

Bottom line, I think it’s useful technology that can benefit the consumer and add value to games distributed online, but it’s a matter of convincing those who pay. . .

This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 11:56 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.