Finally, downloadable content comes to everyone’s favorite brick and mortar retail chain. Wait…
In a statement from GameStop COO Paul Raines at the BMO Capital Markets conference in New York today, the retailer plans to offer the purchase of Xbox Live and Playstation Network downloadable content of large market titles from their stores. The service, created in conjunction with Microsoft and Sony, will be begin testing in early 2010.
The content will be available when you purchase the original title from your friendly local GameStop. The transaction can be completed with any cash or credit, including trade-ins, at the GameStop cash registers and the hardware providers will then initiate the download on the consumer’s console at home.
“If you love X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” Raines said. “Imagine being able to take home the physical copy at launch, plus have a few costumes and villains sent to your PS3 waiting for you when you get home.”
Raines added that this service is part of GameStop’s overall digital distribution strategy. Full downloads of complete games is not their focus as they are betting that gamers are more inclined to enhance beloved games with DLC than to try downloading untested new games.
While it seems like a good move for the largest game retailer to begin expanding into providing more downloadable content, I wonder why this service is necessary. It’s quite a simple process to download the content you want from the console.
On the other hand, if you know that you are going to buy all of the DLC offered when you purchase the game, this will only make the process more convenient. We gamers are a lazy bunch and removing all possible stops between games and our wallets is probably a good thing. It is also a viable alternative for those of us without credit cards, such as conspiracy theorists who don’t want to connect to the hivemind and children.
Actually, the more I think about it, this is a genius move for GameStop. Now I don’t have to bother converting U.S dollars into points or “buttons” or whatever fake currency the console companies have been trying to force us to purchase all these years.
