High Street Retailers push towards Digital Distribution

High Street Retailers are now taking the steps and expanding their digital sales services to customers in preparation for the future. Metaboli’s Paul Howes believes that these steps are becoming pretty common now in the expected shift over to digital distribution within the next few years.

As reported by GI.Biz, Paul Howes thinks that big UK retailers such as GAME are now seeing the signs of a digital era and are now taking the necessary steps to make sure they take advantage of this.

When speaking about Metaboli’s partnership with GAME he stated: ”We’ve seen in recent months a real development of that relationship. Initially we provided them with a white label portal, but in the last three or four months we’ve actually started integrating links into their product pages. So we’re giving their PC buyers a direct alternative to buying the boxed version.”

He also thinks that year 2012 will start to see the digital service overtake the High Street PC games sales.

He added: ”It’s an awful lot to do with broadband speeds and broadband networks. In the UK Virgin Media are pushing out 50 meg and fibre, BT is now pushing out fibre optic towards 2012. We feel that 2012 could well be the tipping point in the UK because of bandwidth issues. We’re seeing steady growth month on month and once we have that bandwidth in place we’ll see a real rush towards digital at that point,”

What are your thoughts on this? We’ve already written about the new Zeebo console which will only offer games digitally. And then there is game developers and analysts backing up the belief that this is a process which will definately happen. Do you agree?

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