Forget iCloud. Do you remember floppy disks?
"When Apple decided to make their 3.5-inch floppies blue, every floppy went to blue. Then when IBM decided to go with shell gray on the 3.5-inch HD floppy, everyone else went to shell gray," recalls a sales manager for a CD/DVD manufacturer whose involvement with video games and computer software dates back to the 1990s. "One year our biggest client bought over 100 million floppy disks. The next year I would have been surprised if they bought 25,000 when they moved to compact disc."
Any game you bring home has the same basic components: a disc, an "Amaray case," and the "case wrap" that displays artwork and text. Some games have a cardboard sleeve that slides over the case, called an "O-ring." And many PC games still come in small cardboard boxes. Over the next three pages in these captions, we've broken down the production process, with images provided by Telltale Games and Coral Graphics. [Note: Emily, the author of this story, worked for Telltale from 2006 to 2009.]
Today he sees the trend repeating, but this time publishers are leaving behind physical media completely: "There used to be an industry need for both DVD and CD and our biggest worry was our competition. Now the biggest worry is technology changing."
He's talking about the rise of digital distribution, and he's right to be worried. With downloadable games on the rise and retail revenues on the decline, the shift toward digital delivery that hit the music industry hard a decade ago is becoming a threat to packaged video games. For now, retail games are still generating more revenue than downloads, but DFC Intelligence recently predicted that this could change by 2013.
As far as former EA executive Bing Gordon is concerned, the move away from packaged games is inevitable. "Physical media's just going away," he said to 1UP earlier this year. "I think we are moving from paper and plastic to digital, and there's a generation that's going to come up and go, 'That paper and plastic just feels wrong. This excess packaging -- it just feels wrong. Having to have used stuff around just feels wrong.'"
It's easy to list the pros of digital distribution: it saves money, it's convenient, and it doesn't leave behind an environmental footprint. If video games follow the music industry's lead and physical media fades into obscurity, is that so bad?
Step 1: Planning: Publishers usually squeeze manufacturing into the final weeks before launch, but they might start planning up to a year in advance. Working backward from the release date, the operations team comes up with a due date to provide final artwork and game files to the manufacturer. The schedule is almost always tight: "We may get a heads-up that it's coming down the road, but for the most part we receive the files to produce proofs about seven days before publishers need us to ship," says Coral Graphics' Lee Ramsey.
What It Costs
What exactly will we lose if packaged games go extinct? Jobs, for starters. Unlike many retail products that are outsourced to China and other countries, in the U.S. video game manufacturing is kept close to home to minimize shipping time and expense. And the same vendor often handles all aspects of manufacturing, from printing and disc replication to assembly and distribution.
"I loved inventory and manufacturing," says Scott Fry, who worked in operations for a game publisher from 1999 through 2006. "It's such an important function of what's going on at a company and a lot of people don't realize that. They don't think about those pieces that need to come together." It seems game companies want it this way, since none of the publishers we reached out to for this article wanted to speak on the record about retail manufacturing.
