A case for kiosk based distribution for Microsoft’s Xbox and Live cloud services.

[Squilliam]

Microsoft has a cloud based distribution network already with Live. This is a service like many others with varying points of access between Xbox 360, computers, mobile devices and soon some TVs. With Live and every other cloud based service the points of access for purchase are the same points of consumption. Every additional active Live connection which is made strengthens the cloud services overall market position. Outside of the direct control with Xbox 360 and Windows Mobile sales there isn’t however a strong way to increase direct adoption of the Live services. This effectively puts Live on a level playing field with other cloud based distribution services as none have clear advantages yet to take over a substantial portion of the market in order to dictate the standard model for cloud based media access.

Kiosks are one of two ways to increase the potential cloud user base significantly without having to first increase the device base. In contrast with online distribution networks, kiosks are still exclusively the property of the network owner. Unlike regular online distribution where there can be multiple online networks which overlap with their basic media distribution functions, the physical nature of kiosks means that retailers who participate with one kiosk based distribution network are far less likely to engage with a competing service. This means effectively that once a kiosk network is in place a competitor will find it much more difficult to break into the market.

The model for kiosk based distribution has already been proved by the success of various vending machine style DVD distribution networks such as Red Box. Where kiosks come into their own in comparison to a vending machine is that people no longer have to return goods to the machine and there can be no physical breakage of the product. A kiosk can also offer a far wider range of services between movies, music, books, games and other applications. A large kiosk based distribution service as a point of distribution can also support the expansion of the points of consumption by creating incentives for people to purchase Live enabled products such as consoles, mobiles, PCs, and internet enabled TVs by giving manufacturers incentives to support a dominant media distribution standard.

Creating a kiosk based distribution network over thousands of sites in America and beyond will be extremely expensive. Even with retailers bearing some of the installation costs it is quite likely that each site may cost several thousand dollars to bring online. Multiplied over 10s of thousands of sites the likely cost to implement a network of kiosks could possibly cost over a billion dollars. This is an achievable figure when considering that Microsoft already has a network of established consoles which are already able to take advantage of both USB sticks with one containing a removable hard drive which can plug into a kiosk. Effectively this means that users can either buy the licence to content for later or concurrent download on their Live enabled devices or they could download directly to their own media storage devices on site. Unlike other competitors Microsoft will be able to sell high value, high margin games directly to their customers which means that every site has a potential to bring in a lot of revenue, especially those sites which are situated in game stores like Gamestop.

Kiosks could help Live become the dominant standard for the cloud based distribution of media and it has the potential to bring in billions of dollars of revenue. It has a lot of risks attached to its implementation however at the moment Microsoft is one of the few companies which have the resources and market position to pull it off effectively. It will enable Microsoft and other partners to offer innovative new ways to satisfy the needs of their customers. Each site will be able to both sell and rent content to end users. Finally it will bolster Microsoft’s market positions in the console and mobile spaces by giving a tangible benefit to people who adopt Microsoft products.

Regards,
Richard

Note, unlike that other guy who says regards, I used my real name! Anyway, please don't rip me a new one just tell me what you think?

 

[Mize]

I argued the case for kiosk based MP3 sales (along with a standard for lossy duplication to "gift" lower quality songs to friends) ages ago (1999 or thereabout - way before ipod). I think kiosks for Live is interesting in that I don't understand the medium available at the kiosk. Is it a DVD? Serial number? You mentioned USB drive and removable hard disk so let's assume that's the medium.

I think it would work with USB sticks and a variety of content (movies, music, games), but some content is so large that the transfer time would be long. I don't see people dragging their hard drives to the grocery store either. I think it has to be something small and, better yet, something they can buy from the kiosk (like a 32 gig usb stick).

I don't think it makes any sense for people who already have Live! and a broadband connection though.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

The dynamics for a long transfer time could change drastically however if there are Kiosks available in say, fast food restaurants. Or perhaps gas stations (with attached convenience stores). Many times you're already going to be there for a certain length of time.

People concerned with time could certainly bring a super fast storage medium if it is supported and if they wanted fast transfers. Kiosks supporting eSATA 6G for example. Crucial has already released 1.8" versions of their C300 SATA 6G SSDs. 1.8" SSD with enclosure would still be smaller than many portable media players and smartphones. Throw in media playing abilities and it could serve multiple purposes in addition to being a data transfer medium.

And if you have a retailer you like to shop at consistently (Walmart or Gamestop for example) they could always offer a service featuring the exchange of standardized USB keys of a set size. They preload popular games of the time and you just swap out your "Walmart" or "Gamestop" branded USB key with one preloaded with the game you want. They can then preload something else on that key you just swapped for whatever game/games is popular at the moment.

As with anything new, there will probably be a bit of a transition period as various entities try to find the best way to take advantage of it.

But something like this, broadens the distribution of media (video, games, music) from large retailers and specialty game shops to pretty much any business or location that has space for a vending machine. Corner Vending machines located in neighborhoods for example (don't see those much in the US, but they are EVERYWHERE in Japan). Imagine walking down to a street corner or bus stop in your neighborhood (assuming a neighborhood without a high incidence of vandalism ) and loading a game at your convenience.

It also completely removes traditional manufacturing, packaging, distribution, etc. No more need to hope you guessed correctly how many copies to manufacture for launch. Don't have to worry about making too many copies and perhaps never making a profit. Or making too few copies and leaving money on the table.

As mentioned it isn't something particularly compelling in countries with widely available uncapped broadband, but would certainly be popular someplace like Canada or Australia where most broadband has a monthly cap.

But the point is that it's just an extension of DD making DD available to people without uncapped broadband with all its attendent benefits over traditional retail distribution of media.

Imagine some form of security that would allow you to download either at home or at a kiosk or whatever, a BRD movie. Your choice whether you wish to burn it to BRD or just store it on an external HDD. And all at a cost far far lower than what current retail movies on BRD cost.

Regards,
SB

 

[corduroygt]

It's very interesting that people who suggest Blu-ray missed the mark and it is too late to do anything about DD are suggesting kiosks.

Optical discs are out there today as a cheap and effective distribution medium. The next step, in 15-20 years or so, will be digital and discs will bridge the gap just fine until then, so there is no room for a download kiosk business to pay off its startup costs before being made irrelevant by digital downloads.

I also don't see why consumers would choose kiosks that don't offer any advantages over retail discs, and I see them as a dead-end business. Discs have the advantage of being a tangible product, while downloads have the advantage of convenience. Kiosks offer neither.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

It's very interesting that people who suggest Blu-ray missed the mark and it is too late to do anything about DD are suggesting kiosks.

Optical discs are out there today as a cheap and effective distribution medium. The next step, in 15-20 years or so, will be digital and discs will bridge the gap just fine until then, so there is no room for a download kiosk business to pay off its startup costs before being made irrelevant by digital downloads.

I also don't see why consumers would choose kiosks that don't offer any advantages over retail discs, and I see them as a dead-end business. Discs have the advantage of being a tangible product, while downloads have the advantage of convenience. Kiosks offer neither.

If we could instantly abandon the retail distribution channel, a studio could sell the same BRD movie that costs 20-25 USD for under 10 USD and still make a larger profit.

If they were smart they'd price it at 10 USD, make a larger profit and sell to more people. Or perhaps at 15 USD matching the occasional sale price on optical disks except this would be the year around price and make an even larger profit off each sale even when accounting for the maintainance costs of the vending kiosk.

But you are correct, as long as studios must rely on retailers they HAVE to produce optical disks whether they want to or not. They really don't have a choice even if it's costing them a lot of money to support an old and outdated distribution system.

Regards,
SB

 

[AntShaw]

The only thing I could forsee happening is that they price the content at the kiosk the same price as the digital content. We've faced this issue since the inception of the digital age and until content providers alter this business structure, it will inevitably fail.

Yes, kiosks can serve content to those that can't get it at home for various reasons, but why limit yourself to just that market? The success of redbox is because it costs $1 when it still costs $5.99 to rent the same movie digitally via your set top box. I refuse to stream digital content at home because of the current price structures. At this point I buy only games over PSN and XBL. I'd see myself buying more full price retail games, if they gave me more value for buying the content digitally.

If any content provider goes the kiosk route, they would need to break that structure to be successful.

 

[specwarGP2]

If we could instantly abandon the retail distribution channel, a studio could sell the same BRD movie that costs 20-25 USD for under 10 USD and still make a larger profit.


Regards,
SB

But studios make a huge profit by double dipping and special edition retail packages. Consumers have been conditioned to this and I have a hard time seeing how they can be convinced to double dip of pay more for a digital file. There has to be something tangible.

 

[-tkf-]

Around here there is no kiosks of any kind, only semi succesfull system i know off (that i used) was for VHS.. and it took med 8 months before i understood why the selection was so thin, everything was porn except for a few "real" movie titles.

Is a kiosk somewhere i go with my Mobile device? or do i get a disc from there with my content? How does it work?

 

[eastmen]

Around here there is no kiosks of any kind, only semi succesfull system i know off (that i used) was for VHS.. and it took med 8 months before i understood why the selection was so thin, everything was porn except for a few "real" movie titles.

Is a kiosk somewhere i go with my Mobile device? or do i get a disc from there with my content? How does it work?

It can work however you want it to really .

They way I'd envision a DD kisok for a next gen system would be simple


You have a vending machine size machine (think coke machine). Towards the top would be a largish 32inch or so tv which would display game videos and advertising for whatever is new or whatever is on sale. Then you'd have a smaller touch screen (7-10 inches ?) this is where you'd make your selections . You'd have an esata drive at around 1.8inches most likely 64 gigs in size. You'd plug it into the system and load your purchase on it and take it home and load it onto your home console and then your transfer drive would be wiped clean so you can get another game. a 1.8inch ssd would be able to write at a 150MB/s easily and it take almost 6 minutes to write the data . Its not to bad of a wait but i think a little long. But on the system you'd be able to buy the game or rent it. They system could also have a stock of controllers and other acessorys to buy.

The benfit would be that you can put them into grocery stores and in malls and pay very little to those places to keep the units there. Alot less than retail's cut and hte cost of bluray/packaging/shipping



edit * They could do add wifi to the drive so that when you plug it in the drive syncs up to the wifi network and while you do your grocery shoping or eat lunch/dinner at a fast food joint the kiosk is at the game is streamed to you.
That would reduce peoples waiting and they should still be able to deliever the 50 gig game in under 10 minutes . The kiosk would tell you the transfer time and they can have the kiosk send a text message to your phone when its done or have a light or something on the drive that turns off when its done transfering


Here is an image of a redbox machine which you can rent dvds in for $2

 

[corduroygt]

Zero benefit for the consumer. It has all the drawbacks of DD with lack of portability and lack of tangible product, but without DD's main benefit of being able to buy stuff without leaving the house. It's a much better strategy to just use discs and wait for DD to catch up, because it eventually will. There is no place for another interim product after Blu-ray, since it'll last fine until downloads catch up.

 

[eastmen]

Zero benefit for the consumer. It has all the drawbacks of DD with lack of portability and lack of tangible product, but without DD's main benefit of being able to buy stuff without leaving the house. It's a much better strategy to just use discs and wait for DD to catch up, because it eventually will. There is no place for another interim product after Blu-ray, since it'll last fine until downloads catch up.

This would be a suplement for those who don't have the bandwidth for DD .


Aside from that we'd be free of slow optical discs and the used game market which means a stronger return on investment for the console maker and the developers.

Aside from that you'd have a tangible product or at least as tangible as a bluray disc. Both have the data whats the diffrence between it being on your hardrive and it being on a bluray ? Nothing at all except you can fit a ton of games on a hardrive and blurays take up alot of space as you start buying more.

 

[Prophecy2k]

I can't see how MS can have any success trying to invent a new distribution system if they go it alone, trying to control everything themselves.

Though the system may offer lots of incentives to MS, it offers very little to the consumer. At the end of the day as long as MS' competitiors will be producing optical media that you can simply buy at a store, not have to wait around for a file transfer, and also still holds resale value, such a system would see masses of MS customers abandoning them in droves.

I also see kiosks as a dead end, but moreso for the reason i described. The only way i can see it being successful is if Sony, MS & Nintendo all joined forces to impliment and install the new distribution network together. By installing effectively service-ambiguous kiosks, wherein a person could log-in to access either their LIVE account, PSN account or Nintendo online account, then i can see it maybe having a chance. But then on the other hand, the likelihood of those three corporations working together on something like this is next to zero.

Lastly, you miss one of the biggest factors which would throw a stick in the works. The used games business being retailers biggest cash cow. Why would a retailer want to install a MS kiosk to sell DD games to consumers that they can make no money off after the initial sale? Especially if they have to fork out themselves part of the cost of installation of the kiosk. They'd simply forgoe it altogether and give their shelf space to MS' competitor's optical disk content, negatively impacting MS' sales in absolute terms.

So in the end it wouldn't matter if MS and partners made more per sale of content at the kiosk. They'd invariably lose out on the whole by only selling a fraction of the content they would have had they used the already established, tried and tested distribution networks.

To be honest i think schemes like this however nice for these big companies, just aren't realistic as you can't after decades of being a content producer, relying on your retail and distribution partners and networks, turn around and screw everybody else over and expect not to be screwed back.

 

[corduroygt]

This would be a suplement for those who don't have the bandwidth for DD.

No need, they'll get by fine with discs and DD will eventually catch up.

Aside from that we'd be free of slow optical discs and the used game market which means a stronger return on investment for the console maker and the developers.

Optical Disc based consoles have been dominant the last 15+ years and people are used to them. The massive cost of starting up a new distribution scheme will not be offset anytime soon, and by that time, no one will use kiosks when they can get the same thing at home.

Aside from that you'd have a tangible product or at least as tangible as a bluray disc. Both have the data whats the diffrence between it being on your hardrive and it being on a bluray ? Nothing at all

Ability to take it to a friend, loan it to a friend, give it as a gift, etc.

except you can fit a ton of games on a hardrive and blurays take up alot of space as you start buying more.

Hard drives are a lot more likely to break when they're carried around and SSD's are still extremely expensive. Optical discs are simple and durable with no moving parts, no screws, etc.
Instead of starting this ill-advised Kiosk thing, much better to stick to existing, proven, and profitable distribution method, and work on DD as the long-term plan.

 

[eastmen]

I can't see how MS can have any success trying to invent a new distribution system if they go it alone, trying to control everything themselves.

Though the system may offer lots of incentives to MS, it offers very little to the consumer. At the end of the day as long as MS' competitiors will be producing optical media that you can simply buy at a store, not have to wait around for a file transfer, and also still holds resale value, such a system would see masses of MS customers abandoning them in droves.

your assuming that MS would price the games the same as sony and nintendo would. There is no reason for them to do so if they are all digital games. They could save huge amounts of money. How much do you think redbox pays stop and shop / pathmark / shoprite to keep the machine in the store. They rent movies at $2 . If MS is selling cod 15 for $40 bucks and sony/nintendo want $60 i don't think people would abandon ms

I also see kiosks as a dead end, but moreso for the reason i described. The only way i can see it being successful is if Sony, MS & Nintendo all joined forces to impliment and install the new distribution network together. By installing effectively service-ambiguous kiosks, wherein a person could log-in to access either their LIVE account, PSN account or Nintendo online account, then i can see it maybe having a chance. But then on the other hand, the likelihood of those three corporations working together on something like this is next to zero.

MS is big enough to go it alone. Remember if a bluray drive is $30 bucks removing it from the system would net them 1.5billion in savings over the course of selling 50m units. That buys alot of kiosks

Lastly, you miss one of the biggest factors which would throw a stick in the works. The used games business being retailers biggest cash cow. Why would a retailer want to install a MS kiosk to sell DD games to consumers that they can make no money off after the initial sale? Especially if they have to fork out themselves part of the cost of installation of the kiosk. They'd simply forgoe it altogether and give their shelf space to MS' competitor's optical disk content, negatively impacting MS' sales in absolute terms.

You wouldn't put the kiosk in game stops. You'd put them at grocery stores , movie thearters , fast food resturants / chain resturants , gyms , in the mall or even gas stations .

Toys r us , walmart target would love to put a kiosk in the front of the store as people are walking in where they get a fixed monthly fee than to have to stock games in their current form.

Currently going into target you see a huge section for video games that rivals any other section in the store with a ton of wasted store space that they could devote to other things. In fact they could devote more space to the actual console units and to big margin sellers like controllers , head sets and other acessorys

Not to mention you'd get rid of alot of live product from the sales floor .

So in the end it wouldn't matter if MS and partners made more per sale of content at the kiosk. They'd invariably lose out on the whole by only selling a fraction of the content they would have had they used the already established, tried and tested distribution networks.

Not if its done properly. I don't think anyone is going to go to the kiosk instead of gamestop if the games would be priced the same. But you wont need to sell your titles if your already saving $20 by buying it DD .

Look at it this way. Dead space 2 costs $60 new for the xbox 360 and you get a trade in credit of $23 at gamestop. Which means you've lost $37 bucks in that transaction. If MS sold dead space 2 at the kiosk for $40 you may not be able to sell it back to them but you'd only be out $3 verses optical and you'd still have the game to play years down the road.

DD with a lower pricing scheme makes even more sense if you keep the game for a few months . Say you bought halo reach in sept and you were having a good time with it well now its only $16 for trade. So you paid $60 and you got $16 towards something new , your now out $44 which in my example is more than the price you'd have paid for the DD game . However again with the DD game you'd still own it and you'd have that $20 bucks to put towards the next game.

Going with some pc devs quotes at $40 MS and the dev would make more money than if it was $60 on optical

To be honest i think schemes like this however nice for these big companies, just aren't realistic as you can't after decades of being a content producer, relying on your retail and distribution partners and networks, turn around and screw everybody else over and expect not to be screwed back.

once again if done properly the only company that would get screwed is gamestop here in the states. Walmart /target /toys r us / grocery stores / gas stations and other places would love the kiosks as there is very little for them to do .

In fact you could greatly increase the reach of your product and have kiosks in alot more places than there are gamestops.


I wouldn't mind going to my local AMC and before catching my movie purchasing a game and then go and sit in the movie and watch the movie and go home and play it.

 

[eastmen]

No need, they'll get by fine with discs and DD will eventually catch up.


Optical Disc based consoles have been dominant the last 15+ years and people are used to them. The massive cost of starting up a new distribution scheme will not be offset anytime soon, and by that time, no one will use kiosks when they can get the same thing at home.

And carts were dominant for the 17 years before optical discs hit the console market.

Many would be able to get the title at home but not everyone and some people have caps and would not want to waste the bandwidth. A kiosk would allow them to enjoy the benfits of DD without having a fast internet connection

Ability to take it to a friend, loan it to a friend, give it as a gift, etc.

With my purchased DD music and DD books i can loan them to a friend (which is basicly the same as bringing it toa friends place) The only thing i can't do is give it as a gift.

However DD would have the ability to bring prices down for the consumers

Hard drives are a lot more likely to break when they're carried around and SSD's are still extremely expensive. Optical discs are simple and durable with no moving parts, no screws, etc.
Instead of starting this ill-advised Kiosk thing, much better to stick to existing, proven, and profitable distribution method, and work on DD as the long-term plan.

SSD's are droping all the time. You can get 60 gig drives for sub $100 prices now even the newer sandforce drives can be had for $100 for a $60 gig unit Prices will continue to drop as they move to 22nm nand for ssds.

As for ODD being profitable , who is it profitable for ? For alot of developers it doesn't seem to be profitable , even for alot of bigger companys it seems to not be very profitable.

OOD is a huge noose around the neck of the gaming industry and its just going to get tighter and tigher. Removing OOD and its archaic delievery system would greatly reduce the costs of releasing games to market and allow smaller devs to thrive and larger devs to be able to pour more and more resources into the market

 

[makattack]

When you write "kiosk" and "cloud" in describing how they might work for gaming, I get images of Internet Cafes or Gaming Centers and even Arcades of past where you either had PC's setup with games installed or upright game consoles filling a room. Only, this time, you have minimal spec PC's or even tablets and touchscreen table-tops, and all the games are run either off the OnLive model, or are browser based. I really don't see this working, especially as smartphones proliferate and if Google's Cr-48 Chrome Notebook idea takes off.

Digital Distribution isn't really cloud computing... that's basically still an offline model, with an online delivery system.

 

[corduroygt]

A kiosk would allow them to enjoy the benfits of DD without having a fast internet connection.

Ummm...the only benefit of DD for consumers is the convenience of being able to buy games without leaving their home. With a kiosk, you're totally missing the point. That's why the existing kiosks are used for buying/renting discs. Also how would you buy a gift for someone and put it under their Christmas tree with a kiosk?

 

[3dilettante]

The usage scenario for a Kiosk:

A customer goes out and buys an eSATA storage device, but no games.
This blank device costs as much as one or two games before the user even has a game.
If you want more capacity or speed, this device may cost more than 5-6 games.

Do eSATA drives come formatted?

The user then leaves the home and finds a kiosk, and must then sit at the kiosk or abandon this multihundred dollar investment that may hold a lot of their game and personal data while doing something else.

Are we comparing the download process to waiting in line at the checkout counter, or a vending machine?
The vending machine is: money in, product drops, done.
Checkout is: money in, product in the bag, done.
Kiosk: money in, storage device in, obstruct any other purchasers for 6-10 minutes, done.

Imagine five people in a game store want to buy something within a half-hour period.
The kiosk itself would prevent this, and what if some jerk buys two games?

The solution is to have multiple kiosks, which means multiplying the up-front expense.

Do these kiosks have their own DD mechanism? So are we also asking the retailer, be it a game store or a local small grocer to foot the bill for a broadband connection for a couple of kiosks? Let's note. It sells nothing but games. No hardware, no peripherals, so the store is going to have clerks for the rest of the merchandise.

So this is a high-cost, low-throughput vending machine that actively discourages multiple purchases and will be obsolete in 4-5 years?
Maintenance, liability if your machine breaks your customers multi-hundred dollar storage investment?
Security measures on the kiosk?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

The usage scenario for a Kiosk:

A customer goes out and buys an eSATA storage device, but no games.
This blank device costs as much as one or two games before the user even has a game.
If you want more capacity or speed, this device may cost more than 5-6 games.

Do eSATA drives come formatted?

Assuming publishers and console makers were smart and lowered the price of games to account for the loss of all retail distribution related costs, a currently selling 60 USD console game could sell for 30 USD and still make a larger profit.

In a scenario like that, 30 dollars from each game going to pay off the up front cost of the delivery medium. 40 dollars if next gen consoles raise the MSRP to 70 USD.

For a 32 GB class 10 SD card we're looking at ~50 USD currently and probably cheaper in 3 years. So in theory 1 game purchased in this method already pays for your delivery medium (assuming price drops in the intervening 3 years). But that's too slow you say since 10 MB/s write speed would take an eternity.

Well, they could go up a notch and get a 32 GB thumbdrive with 60 MB/s write speed which runs 99 USD right now. So takes a few more games. So 3-4 games maybe. Or maybe only 1-2 games 3 years from now.

Well, you could spring for a 2 TB external HDD with ~80-120 MB/s write speed for 99 USD right now.

Or if they were really impatient a 300+ MB/s SSD in an external enclosure for ~140 USD (64 GB) to ~500 USD (256 GB).

Or whatever happens to be even faster in 3 years time.

And once you're past that initial investment you're potentially saving money with every game purchased versus the current retail distribution chain system.

Are we comparing the download process to waiting in line at the checkout counter, or a vending machine?
The vending machine is: money in, product drops, done.
Checkout is: money in, product in the bag, done.
Kiosk: money in, storage device in, obstruct any other purchasers for 6-10 minutes, done.

Imagine five people in a game store want to buy something within a half-hour period.
The kiosk itself would prevent this, and what if some jerk buys two games?

The solution is to have multiple kiosks, which means multiplying the up-front expense.

Well people would obviously go for the DD if they have uncapped broadband available.

People could also copy the files over at a friends house.

Kiosks are sort of the last resort of distribution. One machine could in theory serve up as many people as it has memory card slots, USB slots, or eSATA slots. It would obviously have to have a fairly robust and speedy storage subsystem if it needed to serve a great many people. A kiosk in a Walmart might need 10 or more (numbers pulled out of my arse) while a corner kiosk like a soda or food vending machine might only need 1 or 2.

And once a person has grabbed it from a kiosk they could in theory then share it with all their friends, thus relieving some of the congestion.

For those people that save money by just getting a slow SD card, they could have a great many SD card slots (50 or 100) each with a door that locks. People go up, put in their card, start the transfer, machine locks the door and prints out a receipt with the unlock code. Or the credit card used to make the purchase is used to unlock the door. Or the person's PSN/Xbox Live account, or whatever. Takes forever sure, but saves poor people money and doesn't clog up on kiosk.

Do these kiosks have their own DD mechanism? So are we also asking the retailer, be it a game store or a local small grocer to foot the bill for a broadband connection for a couple of kiosks? Let's note. It sells nothing but games. No hardware, no peripherals, so the store is going to have clerks for the rest of the merchandise.

So this is a high-cost, low-throughput vending machine that actively discourages multiple purchases and will be obsolete in 4-5 years?
Maintenance, liability if your machine breaks your customers multi-hundred dollar storage investment?
Security measures on the kiosk?

It could have it's own wireless system where the kiosk owner can wirelessly upload new games to the kiosk library, delete games that are no longer bought, whatever. Or it could be manually updated.

Vandalism will be the greatest threat. But that'll only really be a problem with machines located on street corners. Everything else is implementation details depending on how flexible you want the system.

Without physical media the kiosk can be as small or large as you wish it to be. As cheap and/or maintainence free as you wish (SSD versus HDD? Wireless updates versus manual? 1 or 2 ports versus 50-100 ports? Locking enclosures versus wait until done? Credit card, cash card, electronic payment only versus Cash also? Etc.).

It could be anywhere from the size of a ruggedized Netbook to full on vending machine.

Of course, that's all assuming publishers and console maker don't get too greedy and instead of just doubling their profits from each game sold they want to make 8+ times the current profit from games and thus price games the same.

Regards,
SB

 

[aaronspink]

Optical Disc based consoles have been dominant the last 15+ years and people are used to them. The massive cost of starting up a new distribution scheme will not be offset anytime soon, and by that time, no one will use kiosks when they can get the same thing at home.

Cartridge based consoles have been dominant since the beginning of time and people are used to them. The massive cost of starting up a new distribution scheme will not be offset anytime soon...