More than any previous year, 2009 was the year that Digital Distribution truly started to establish itself. Being the service that kicked the whole thing off, Steam has naturally been leading this charge, with some fairly impressive marketing and sales designed to encourage more and more people to give DD a try. However, this year also marked other distributors and companies finally starting to come into their own. Taking a leaf out of Valve's playbook, services like Direct 2 Drive and Impulse have started adopting tactics such as snap sales and bargain bundles in order to generate hype, and in general have been starting to make a name for themselves. After all, at least for now there's still room to argue over who's number 2.

The foundations of Digital Distribution have been coming into place, with much of the dross being jettisoned as publishers and punters get to grips with the idea of buying and receiving their games online. It's been a long time coming, but companies are starting to realise that the digital distribution model is fundamentally different to brick and mortar retail. Gone (to a large extent) are the crazy concepts of install limited purchases, arbitrary region limited sales, and DRM schemes designed abuse your drivers. In their place comes the understanding that you can't stop piracy or the second-hand market (which, let's be blunt, are both the same thing and as evil as each other as far as games publishers are concerned) using traditional means. So instead a more efficient approach is turning your game into a value added service, not hindering your paying customers where the pirates don't suffer any problems, but instead giving them a reason to buy and hold onto their games by adding to and maintaining them over time.

The year was also marked by DD moving into some truly ludicrous pricing territory. Previous years have seen snap sales and dramatic price drops, but nothing to this extent. D2D, Impulse and Steam have seemingly been caught in an all out sales war, with even AAA titles less than a year old getting half price sales or more (some even going for a just a few dollars). Indie games, always a staple of Digital Distribution, have been happy to embrace snap sales as well, with titles like Zeno Clash getting heavy (but short lived) discount deals, where had they been at retail they would still be selling at full price. Traditional retail theory states that you're devaluing your products by having such massive price drops, even if they're temporary. Valve have already come out stating they don't view this to be the case.

And so we enter Space Year 2010 AD, and there's plenty to look forward to (or stare mortified at) still on the horizon. So here are a few items of interest I'm going to be looking out for when it comes to Digital Distribution in the coming year.

Games for Windows Live

In the past I've made little effort to hide my disdain for the service as it currently exists. As a community system GFWL leaves a lot to be desired when compared to Steam. Not the least of these problems being the lack of a dedicated external client to run. The fundamental problem with GFWL and its competition with Steam is that there's never really been a financial incentive to improve the service like there has been with Xbox Live.

With Microsoft entering into Digital Distribution this year, it's easy to the potential some very good things to come of this, or some very very bad things to come of it. The obvious benefit is that this might finally give them the incentive to actually develop their service and make it competitive, now that they have some actual profits riding on the outcome. For once, Steam would have a competitor not only for the digital marketplace that it's established, but also the community system.

The potential problem with this arrangement is the position that Microsoft is in. As platform owner they've got a distinct advantage in marketing their product and making it the de facto standard for digital distribution. It's a position that is ripe for abuse in any number of ways. There are other possible problems naturally, such as how the pricing is going to work out, and whether Microsoft will ever allow us to buy DLC without those insipid Microsoft Points. But having the platform owner own their own DD store automatically puts them in a position of superiority over all their competitors. Games for Windows Live being installed on every PC by default is something that could change everything about digital distribution on the PC. Given their previous record to date, I'm sceptical they could actually effect such a change, but they're certainly in a position to try, so it'll be interesting to see where this little experiment leads.

Digital Pricing

Despite still being heavily dominated by brick-and-mortar retail, Digital Distribution has been making heavy inroads not just with PC gaming but in the console sphere as well. What's interesting is how the pricing model has been shifting so completely this year. Publishers still can't afford to price differently for DD outlets compare to street retail, but there have been innovative ways of changing the relationship. Exclusive DLC (both paid and unpaid) that's not available in stores, package deals, special sales, there's a wide variety of options for anyone looking to give their product an edge in value for money.

Valve stunned pretty much everyone when they held a half-price sale on Left 4 Dead 1 this year, a game that at the time was only 6 months old. More startling was the revelation that they made more during that one weekend sale than they did during the entire release period.

The value of being able to adapt your price point cannot be overstated. Independent developers not releasing in-store, such as ACE Team (Zeno Clash) and Runic games (Torchlight) have been happy to capitalise on this, releasing games at full price and then offering free updates to keep the game community engaged, and sales to keep purchases coming in WELL past the point they would have been receiving any significant revenue from a high street store.

The future of this kind of approach remains unclear however. Whilst DD should be flexible in its pricing, such massive, hype generating discounts have the potential of causing problems for full price releases later on, with people waiting for the inevitable sale. This hasn't been evidenced to date, and Valve clearly think that's not the case, but realistically it's going to take a few more years before we see any kind of effect on release title sales. It's an issue well worth keeping an eye on.

Steam and Valve

Being the flagship of Digital Distribution on the PC, we've seen some interesting additions, and controversies, surrounding Steam this year. More commercial releases are being sold in store directly tied TO Steam, to the extent that you can effectively throw away the disc when it's been registered. Achievements, Steam cloud, community features, all of these things are seeing more integration as Steam becomes less of a store and more its own platform. It's safe to say that Steam is well on the way to becoming the Xbox Live of the PC (assuming Microsoft doesn't have other plans).

On the flipside to this is the griping that's come along with it, in particular renewed calls for Steam to be split from Valve, from industry figures such as Brad Wardell (Stardock) and Randy Pitchford (Gearbox entertainment). To go slightly more personal for a second, whilst I can understand their points, Randy Pitchford is still talking idiocy for any number of reasons, and I can't characterise Wardell's statements as anything other than pure hypocrisy considering that Stardock owns its own competing distribution channel with Impulse. Even so, with notable industry figures starting to push for this, are Valve and Steam coming under pressure to part ways?

In truth, it's unlikely (if not outright unfeasible) for Steam to somehow be split from Valve as a corporate entity. It's also unlikely that any real pressure is going to mount to do so unless Valve start making crass moves to undermine their competitors and more independent developers (something which Pitchford accused Valve of doing, only to receive responses from several independent developers refuting this). I foresee more griping in the future, but for the time being, the case still isn't strong enough for having Valve and Steam become separate entities.

OnLive

The idea of playing a game remotely without needing anything beyond the controls and a fast connection is starting to get more traction. There's definitely an appeal in being able to access an entire game collection with just a net connection and a screen.

There's not much to say about this one. There's only one question, will this work? Is it the right time to try for a service where you play full commercial titles over the internet? It's an idea to keep an eye on, largely because of its potential to change everything about the games industry as it currently stands.

The unfortunate reality is that this is likely still an idea before its time. Whilst we have broadband speeds capable of sending data within hundreds of milliseconds, the proposed idea is fully real-time streaming of images up to 720p, all with an input lag that would not hamper gameplay. Leaving aside the inherent gameplay problems with this, broadband connections aren't really tailored for a continuous and consistent downstream of that magnitude, a problem amplified greatly when you consider the serious bandwidth caps you'll be running against to even give it a try.

So complete bust? Not necessarily, there's still the potential for other OnLive services to make some headway with the architecture they've created (streaming movies, videoconferencing, different styles of games that aren't as dependant on reaction or heavy usage of bandwidth). It's a service that could potentially survive long enough until the idea of streaming modern commercial games is viable. Assuming that they don't overplay their hand, we likely won't be seeing significant adoption of OnLive in the coming year, but you may be hearing more about it in the years to come.

So that was 2009, heading into the new decade. We still don't have our flying cars, our houses do not have sensor operated smart doors, and our fridges do not greet us in the morning. We do however seem to be pulling almost all our information, interactions and entertainment to us through a vast world spanning aether of radio signals and and electrons. Captain Kirk never had access to Wikipedia on the go, so I'm happy to see that if nothing else we've one upped Star Trek.

See you in 2010.