He believes AAA games face the same kind of crossroads. They've become so expensive to produce, the margin for profit so thin, that they need to consider other options. He's 100% certain the major AAA publishers will eventually move to web-games and in fact, the shift has already begun. Many new retail games are promoted on their websites with small, casual mini-game versions.
Pushing the switch further, piracy will become more of a concern than it is already. In North America, piracy is mitigated by the sheer size and complexity of the act. Unlike a song, which is 3mb and can run in a variety of players, or a movie which is 700mb and requires a double click to operate, video game piracy doesn't quite hit the mainstream because they're several gigs in size and most grandmothers likely cannot operate Daemon tools.
As download speeds grow to those enjoyed by other countries where piracy runs rampant and those hackers get more sophisticated, that gap will disappear. Like the music and movie industries before them, games will need to get creative to survive. Koster sees his solution.
"MMOs should be free to play," he told us. "The value lies in the service, not the content."
It makes piracy unnecessary and is exactly how they fight the problem on the Asian market where illegal games can be purchased on street corners.
The shift from retail is not a new sentiment; every CEO we spoke to at AGDC seemed to believe that eventually they'd distribute their games exclusively through the digital medium. But, the price model and value are not yet accepted by all.
While many developers don't yet buy into his ideas on pricing, they are moving more often to self-distribution, often online. Koster points out that the game developers in the MMO space are slowly becoming the big publishers. SOE, for example, is a portfolio of games. Turbine CEO Jeff Anderson said he would one day like to see his games distributed exclusively by his company. Mythic got absorbed into EA to run their MMOs.
On a smaller scale, a slew of companies have come from Asia and operate their own MMO platforms where multiple games are available through one website. All of these companies have either completely moved beyond traditional publishers like EA, or are in the process of doing so.
We asked him about the recent example of BioShock, which seems to fly in the face of everything he says. It's a single-player only game, with huge production values and on a big console.
