AugustAPC said:
I don't get it. Arcana Heart 3, and Deathsmiles II X are both only available through digital distribution and 30 bones a piece. I absolutely detest spending that much money on digital content. I can accept digital content as re-releases of old classics, small arcade games or game updates, but a full on game that's so large in size and costs so much?
Digital content will be useless and worthless down the line. What happens if my PS3 or Xbox 360 bricks when our current PSN and XBLA are no longer available? I lose my game entirely. That's just no acceptable to me when it's such a large amount of money. Also, as a collector, I like to have my games on display.
So what's the deal Aksys? Are your North American sales just not high enough to justify disc releases? I just hate that I'm missing out on Deathsmiles II, because I just can't justify spending that much on digital content. Luckily I can import Arcana Heart 3 (PAL) for a reasonable price, but as far as I know Deathsmiles II is not region free on the Xbox. :\
Deathsmiles IIX has an easy explanation: it's being self-published by Cave, and it's kind of difficult to do a physical release when you don't have a North American branch.
In general, though, my understanding is that sometimes releasing such niche games on disc isn't viable for whatever reason (not always necessarily having to do with sales), and clearly most publishers would rather release something as a download than not release it at all. This is just me, but I also highly doubt that Sony and Microsoft will just stop distributing digital download games when they update to a newer system; I'd imagine it's possible to set it up so that either downloadable games continue to be available from an updated marketplace or at least give game owners an option to re-download owned content even if it's no longer on the store. They'd be foolish to just cease distribution like that, and I doubt they're unaware of that fact.
I agree that I'd rather have a physical product, though, and can totally understand where you're coming from as a collector. Isn't AH3 region-locked in the European release as well, though? I remember ZU mentioning that at some point.
