How much are you willing to pay for packaging?

That’s the question I was asking myself this weekend. I’d downloaded Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective on my iPhone. I’d been told by many of my friends that it was an experience not to be missed. So I downloaded the game reluctantly. I had my doubts. But once I sat down with the game properly, I was hooked. I wanted more.

Unfortunately, the Ghost Trick on the iPhone only includes the first two chapters of the game for free. The rest of the game cost money.  It was here that I encountered my dilemma.

When I finally put my iPhone down, I’d decided that I wanted to play more Ghost Trick. So I did an internet search for the title. To my surprise, Ghost Trick was selling for $34.99 at most stores in Toronto. It cost 35 bucks!? I swiped the lock screen on my phone and opened up the app again. The complete version of Ghost Trick costs $9.99 on the iPhone.

What was I to do? I could shell out 25 extra dollars for what amounted to a cartridge and a case. Or I could tap my touch screen twice, and keep playing for the rest of the night. I’m proud to say that I put the phone down.  I had to keep reminding myself that I didn’t want to purchase something I couldn’t touch (No touch screen jokes, now). But it certainly got me thinking: How much longer can physical distribution survive?

I’ve discussed digital distribution before. I like having physical copies of the media that I own. That’s part of the reason why I still go to record stores to buy CDs, instead of simply clicking a few buttons on iTunes. Sure, it’s more expensive, but not actually by all that much. When I buy a CD, I also get to look at the cool liner notes.

Physical distribution costs a lot of money. The games have to be copied onto discs or cartridges. Cover art and instruction manuals have to be printed. The boxes must be molded, and everything else must be placed into them. The box must be shrink wrapped, then packed for shipment to a store. The store obviously has to charge a mark-up in order to turn a decent profit.  By the end of it all, the consumer is paying some pretty hefty fines for sticking to their convictions.

I’ve noticed that the prices for CDs and DVDs have gone down as of late, probably in response to people choosing digital distribution over physical products. That’s a smart strategy, in my view. It might not stop digital distribution from taking over entirely, but it’ll certainly at least give the physical distribution chain a few more years of life. When are the video game companies going to learn that physical distribution is dying, and lower the prices? If they don’t lower their prices soon, it may become economically unreasonable for even the most hardcore of physical distribution supporters to continue their patronage.