New Distribution Scheme Intriguing, But Ultimately Flawed

From E! Online:

Brokeback Mountain isn’t done breaking ground.

On Tuesday, the Oscar-winning gay cowboy drama will help Hollywood embrace the brave new world, becoming the studios’ first major title to debut as a download-to-own movie on the same day it’s out on DVD.

It sounds great, but as always, with the MPAA, there’s a catch. They own the company that’s selling the downloadable movie, and they’re selling it at a premium price. $26.99 for Brokeback Mountain, which is available at Buy.com for $16.97, and at Amazon.com for $16.98. So, for ten dollars more, you can download the movie (you must download it within 24 hours). You’re limited to playing it on three different computers, and you get no special content, as far as I can tell.

When you live in the boonies like I do, you could buy the DVD from Amazon or Buy.com, get more content, get it cheaper, and, very nearly, get it faster.

Movie executives take note: You want me to pay more money to get a movie? I’m a movie-addict. I’ll pay more money. I’m not stupid, though. You have to give me something. Why not release the movie for download the week after it leaves theaters (and give me more than 24 hours to download it — I’m on dialup, and I guarantee the connection will die at least once, and between work and sleep, I’ll almost certainly be outside the download time)? You’re not hurting theaters by doing that.

Heck, give theater owners a code that they can print on tickets, and only let people who have that code download (preferably before the movie leaves theaters, but for the sake of argument, we’ll stick to the one-week-out timeline). Worried about people sharing their codes? Make it a unique code that can only be used once. Charge $25 to download the movie then, and drop the price to $10-15 when the DVD’s released.

I went to see Serenity four times opening weekend. I bought the DVD. I would certainly have paid good money to have it available to watch between the time that it left theaters and its arrival on DVD.

Granted, I’m not the average movie goer, but I don’t have to be. Book publishers have used price discrimination schemes (charging enthusiastic readers $25 for a hard cover book, then making the paperback, often with a preview of another book, much cheaper) to their advantage for a long time. Why not get in on that?

The new distribution scheme doesn’t have to be cheaper, it doesn’t have to have new features, movies don’t have to be available faster, and it doesn’t have to be more convenient (downloading isn’t that much more convenient than visiting a store, and it’s definitely not much more convenient than visiting Amazon), but if it’s not got at least one of those three things going for it, I doubt you’ll have as much success as you hope.

Bethesda Softworks, the company behind The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, has already started releasing some extra content, starting with a couple of new horse “skins”, giving the horses an armored look and some extra defense points. The cost? $2.50 (200 Microsoft Points).

Some gamers are, predictably, incensed at this. These gamers feel that new content should be free, unless it’s a full expansion pack (in which case they’re willing to pay full price for additional content that’s actually a fraction of the original game — gamers have never been accused of being consistent).

Other gamers are Xbox 360 gamers who feel they’re getting the shaft from Bethesda, due to a mistaken belief that Xbox gamers are paying for content that PC gamers are getting for free. According to Oblivion Downloads, the official download site, that’s not true, as computer gamers are being charged $2.00 to download the content as well. (Whether that content will be illegally distributed for free by gamers remains to be seen.)

Myself, I can’t see this as that big a deal. I’ve already gotten more out of Oblivion than I’ve gotten out of most games I’ve purchased in the last year (much more so than City of Villains, for example, and I paid a monthly fee for that one for a few months), and I haven’t even started the main quest yet. So, it’s not like Bethesda released a half-finished game, and is requiring us to pay more to finish it. They’re not Sega, (see: Shining Force III).

Heck, I’d like to see them expand this sort of thing. There are a lot of very talented “amateur” modders out there, and I’d like to see someone set up a service that would allow them to charge a minimal fee for the extra content that they’ve added (especially if they made it available for 360 gamers), but I can see why that would be problematic for a company legally, unless they thoroughly tested every single mod they made available (and, in the current political climate, rated the content), which would add to the cost of the modifications, I think.

I probably won’t buy this pack, especially not if it requires me to buy a new horse with armor (I would consider it if it allows me to simply buy armor for Shadowmere, my current in-game horse). That’s not because I don’t think that they should charge for these sorts of things, it’s simply that horse armor isn’t worth it to me (honestly, the time involved in downloading the pack to my Xbox 360 via dial up is more inhibitive to me than the $2.50). I might consider the Orrery content mentioned to be coming soon, and I’ll definitely get the Wizard’s Tower content. I’ve got a magic user character that I intend to start playing with as soon as I get tired of my current assassin/thief/vampire, and that tower would be perfect for him.