Digital Distribution: Kill Games More Slowly

Back in the heyday of the SNES and Genesis, you either purchased or rented a game and knew if it sucked in the first 10 minutes of inserting the cartridge and flipping the power on. It was cut and dry.

Today we live in the age of digital distribution. We still, for the most part, buy games from a store, but now gamers are fancy to updates, add-ons, and bug fixes. This is like when value meals were first created at McDonald's. You think your getting more, but really your just getting crap.

Gears of War is the best example of crap delivered to you online. The retail game was excellent. It was the Big Mac of games for the Xbox 360. It sold billions and billions of copies. I played it through, beginning to end, three times (damn that online Achievement system!). The problem was that the online game wasn't quite perfect. People found ways to cheat, exploit and generally ruin a perfect game.

This is where digital distribution kicks in. Epic Games knew they would be able to fix anything wrong with the game after it sold 10⁴³ copies. They tested the game I'm sure. But no one can possibly see how a game will be manipulated in the hands of Cheeto-powdered fingers hopped up on Mountain Dew.

Now getting it's second dose of content Thursday, June 18th. More Achievements and a fix to the way you run. Come on. The way you run? Yeah. Actually it's a fix to the first fix. A fix that the game didn't even need. Doesn't that seem like something that should have been covered well before the game was released. That's like tweaking the formula for Coke. Or re-releasing Star Wars with scenes that, back while shooting, weren't possible.

Gears of War is going to continue to stay in it's case. Why? Because the developers over-handled their product. They couldn't leave "pretty damn good" alone.

You know who should do some over-handling? Microsoft. It's broke. Fix it.