By Tamara Chuang, The Orange County Register, Calif. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Sep. 8--The parent company of Irvine's GameSpy on Tuesday launched one of the nation's first online stores targeting gamers who thrive on instant gratification.
Direct2Drive.com, which debuted with 26 PC games, lets customers skip the post office or local game store and instead download the purchase immediately.
"The realization from the publishers is that digital e-commerce is the natural next distribution of PC titles," said Jamie Berger, vice president and general manager of consumer products at GameSpy's parent, IGN Entertainment in Brisbane.
Direct2Drive is in Irvine, where employees from GameSpy's download site, FilePlanet, are running the operation.
Game sites have offered games for download for a few years. But in most cases, including FilePlanet, those were usually limited trials and demo versions. Last fall, GameSpy offered the full version of Ubi Soft's "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell" as a free 1.3-gigabyte download to new or renewing annual subscribers. About 15,000 people took GameSpy up on the offer, Berger said.
In March, IGN began selling full games through FilePlanet as a test. Some 19,000 games sold, giving IGN reason to proceed with a full-scale online store.
The growth of high-speed Internet use and improvements to anti-piracy tools have contributed to making this distribution method a viable option for consumers and game companies, said Schelley Olhava, an analyst who tracks the game industry for market-research firm International Data Corp.
"It helps companies feel that the games aren't being handed around (and copied) between friends," Olhava said. "We definitely see it as a growing market." IDC began tracking this niche last year. It forecasts that sales of games bought and downloaded to PCs will reach $763 million by 2007, from $120 million this year.
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