Epic Games Boss Says Physical Retail is ‘Inefficient’

Speaking to Edge, Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney stated that physical retail is “inefficient”.

“The market is inefficient now. You run ads on television so that people walk into a retail store, buy a piece of plastic and stick it into their digitally connected device. I think we have a lot of latitude – publishers and developers alike – to increase the efficiency of that.

“Once you have a game, it’s available pervasively online, and your devices are all Internet-connected, do you really need to run television ads to get people to find it at the top of the App Store?” he added.

Sweeney continued with saying that digital downloads will allow better budgeting. And money which goes to publishing games can now go to actually developing them instead.

“I’m looking forward to our digital future. Development budgets are going to be the dominant cost in the industry, and [increasing] the efficiency of building games will directly improve profitability. As we move more sales of games out of retail, that creates a lot more flexibility for developers to make games at different scales and price them differently.”

I do realize that they would make more if they did not have to package the product into boxes and whatnot, but the collector in me is screaming at the notion of all digital. I kind of like looking at my physical collection. It’s not just the same looking at my Steam library or GoG.com account. It’s not the same.