have you tried the Web store? http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Pr...5-d8024d4a07d2

That is absolutely bloody outrageous. Do you know other people it's happened to? If you can get enough of them together you'll have a bit more weight behind your complaint. And you should complain.

I remember last month PC Gamer ran an article on digital distribution licenses, and explained how no-one actually owned games they'd bought from digital distribution sites; Rather they had payed for access to the service's license, access which the service was able to revoke whenever they chose. The Steam EULA actually went as far as to explicitly say "this license does not infer any ownership by the customer" or similar.

Now, this may be something everyone has agreed to, knowingly or not, but there is such a thing as a unfair contract. It is fully within your rights to speak out against such abuse of a legal convention that was supposed to enforce truth and honour.

Mac's is the only instance I've ever heard of this happening, ever.

You have to go to your download history. You can redownload them from there. I had to do the same thing with Psychonauts.

Oh.




Well they should have left a note or something.

They give absolutely no instructions on how to do it.

Oh. That's rather less outrageous. It's not very helpful, but then that's a Microsoft trademark.

Well. ... This pen. This pen is pretty damn outrageous. Doesn't work. *Scribble scribble* See?

Would've replied but only just noticed the thread had been split and moved. I was going to say something low like that. The electrical store Comet was bought from administration for 20p recently.

It sounds crazy, but bear in mind that whoever bought it, even for that low price, is picking up their tonne of debt with the purchase. It is the buyers responsibility now to try and clear all of that debt, and on top of that, turn the tarnished public image of the store around and start making a profit again. Pretty monumental task! If they fail, they're millions down due to the money they'll need to find to pay back whoever's owed.

hopefully now that they've been bought, they'll start stocking new EA games again. I Don't know the ins and outs of it, but apparently, game said "we want (Blah blah blah)" And it was a stupid ask, and EA were like "no way!" So then game was all "Fine then, we're not stocking your new games." I'm not that arsed to be honest, Mass Effect doesn't interest me.

I like holding games, but I like discounts. I would buy more games online if my internet connection was faster. As it is, it takes me several days to download Portal 2.

I'm always going to love actually holding a game cart or disc over downloads. However It is easier to buy a game off steam and we'll have to get used to it. Retail games won't be around for much longer in my opinion.

as much as i don't like it, i agree. man, the next few years are gonna be hell for me as i don't have internet at home or xbox live

Well it's a good thing your opinion is incorrect.

How can an opinion be incorrect?

I've gotta say, I've outgrown the whole 'want to be able to hold box and disc' thing, unless it's a special edition. Those go on display in my living room above the X-box boxes. All my PC games are piled up somewhere in my PC room, but I can't honestly say I laid eyes on any of them in months, much less picked them up or opened them. Steam is a real life changer in that aspect. I bought pretty much any major PC game trough DD the last few years.

If it's poorly informed.

Not that Crashpunk's is.

It's unlikely that boxes are gonna disappear soon. Digital distribution came some time ago and despite its popularity there are still box versions of almost every game

Until internet speeds improve in the smaller cities, digital downloads are not a viable replacement for discs.

You say that, but I have a download speed of 1mb/s in my smallish hometown of 50,000 people. That's more than enough to download a game overnight.

What about two games? Or three?

Buying a physical game is a trip to the store. Downloading a major title can take upwards of a day in some cases.

Trips to the areas where video games stores exist are a once a week event for me at best. Generally far more rarely than that. Leaving it to download overnight is not really an issue in comparison.

Are you really so impatient that you must be able to play a game the instant you decide to purchase it? I'm amazed you're able to hold on long enough to get home from the store without ODing from anticipation.

I've actually had moments when I was younger where I absolutely had to play a game here and now. Mostly those were old games hidden away somewhere in the house and I would spend the entire day looking for them. If I couldn't find it, I would go out to every store I knew of and tried to find a copy. If that didn't work, I just sat around being pissed. :lol:

To be fair, I always take my DS with me when I go to buy a pokemon game so I can have a taste of it on the subway home.

I see your point, but I think it’s less patience and more having a tangible thing to show for spending your money. With physical copies, you might not be playing it the instant you buy it but you have a box, a disc – a physical object to see and hold. You take it home and you stick it in the console, and it works*.

When you buy a digital game, your money disappears into the ether and you are presented with a loading screen. Depending on the game and your internet connection, this screen may stick around for some time.

One one hand, you have a less convenient shopping trip, but the end result is more tangible. In the other, the process of buying is much quicker and nicer, but your game takes a bunch of time to appear on your hard drive.


*With certain exceptions.

I think that it's mostly a matter of boxes disappearing in countries where internet speeds are high. For instance the Netherlands right now has an average internet speed of 15mb/s.

Glassfiber connections are currently being rolled out nation wide, so that figure is expected to at least double in the next 10 years. When everyone has a speed like that, people are more likely to use digital distribution than in a country where the average download speed is still around 1mb. So physical shops may die out around here, but may thrive in remote parts of the US or Australia for example.

Well, I have no idea if it was just my internet connection or Steam being bad at downloading, but Portal 2 took me in total about 70 hours to download. I can Stream youtube videos fine and an anime episode takes between 30-45 minutes to download, so I have no idea why it's taking that long via Steam. PC Demos are way too large in terms of filesizes too, now I just download indie games or watch videos on youtube for a better picture.

American ISPs have too slow of speeds and too many data caps for it to be viable in the forseeable future. People will also be less likely to buy a $60 game blindly since they can't trade it in if they don't like it.

How about a different idea. "Download Kiosks" where you could pay a piddly fee, £5 per disc, and get a 60GB game burnt onto a blu-ray disc in a few minutes. Everyone's happy.

Haha. Within the decade, 93% of Australia is going to have 1Gbit connections and the rest will mostly have 6+Mbit. Don't tar us by association. :p


I don't know where you're at, but American ISPs are faster and have larger caps (if not unlimited) than most of the rest of the world.



BTW, if you have access to fast internet elsewhere, you can actually download via Steam on a different computer (or get the files from a friend who has already downloaded it) and then transfer to yours using an external hard drive.

You're a handheld gamer? Eww. I sort of went off it ever since DSi. I don't even know why I have one. PS Vita looks promising though.

Not 'You're a Pokemon fan?' not 'You're a Nintendo gamer?' but 'You're a handheld gamer?'

That's new. Just as stupid though.

“You play on a small screen? Ewwww!”

I was going to mention the Pokemon thing, but I didn't know how you guys would react, as some of you do seem like, "Pokemon" fans.

And it's not the small screen that annoys me, It's the quality of the games.

Good games are good games regardless of what console they are on.

And that's that.

Except the quality of a game should not be judged by the platform it’s on. A good game is one which does one thing or lots of things really well; be they emotive storytelling, solid gameplay, unique mechanics or great style. Being on a handheld platform does not prevent any of these from being achieved.

I mean quality as in graphics, sound ect, you'd never find a game like Skyrim on PSP. But there are no great games on handheld consoles, no defining ones anyway.

That's a matter of opinion. I can't speak for the PSP (Though I know a few PSP games I'd love to play) but I've probably bought more DS/GBA games than games for any other console since the N64.

I just see handheld gaming as more of a time killer rather than a hobby, but thats my opinion.

I don't understand the division between time killer and hobby.

It smacks of elitism.

something to do when your bored and have got nothing else to do/something you can't wait to get home for

I buy pretty much all of my games and movies used. I don't really care who the money goes to, but I'm certainly not made of it myself. Considering most games worth playing are $60 or more, and I simply don't want to pay full price for that if I don't have to.

I await your stoning.