Something that has been popping up more and more recently with the growth of internet speed, download limits as well as hard drive capacity is downloadable ocntent. The most prominent of these is in gaming consoles and portable devices such as ipods. There is a lot of opportunity for growth here because unlike other products, these are basically limitless when it comes to stock. Take a song for example, on average it's about 5mb on a computer and that can be given out a thousand, a million or as many timea as someone wants because all you get is a copy made at point of sale. Therefore you eliminate the need of a physical store or extended physical storage.
I see this technology being the future. Now this is very far off so I hope it's not too hard to understand. Computers at the moment have limited output, you have sound, visuals and if you have a printer you have that output option too. Imagine if this were to grow. Say you were feeling hungry. In the future if we were able to harness the power of atoms, we could store the data of a product on a computer down to the atomic level, then use a device to create an object with that atom structure and bingo you could have your own perfect pizza down to the last atom on hand without having to wait for all those normal cooking and delivery times. Very far fetched technology but I think achievable considering the technology we have now compared to decades ago.
However at the moment I think this technology isn't being utilized. People seem happy to just put something up and think that people will pay for it without any price fluctuations. Which by current standards make sense since most price fluctuations are caused by the limitations of stock eg. rare(low stock) = expensive or overstock = less expensive to clear before it becomes obsolete. So there is no normal type reason for this...however when you think of it this is heavily limiting on demand.
One thing I've found that I personally think when looking at downloadable content is simply that it will be there tomorrow. Most don't have a time in which they will expire and they appear to not have a changing cost meaning you never get a 'good deal'. This limits impulse buying. You have forever to think about it and the more time you have the more time you have to consider why you don't need it. Since most of the DLC at the moment is entertainment items you can easily justify not buying it.
So I believe there needs to be stock like limits placed onto DLC. Have sales for limited time or limiting quantity. Whilst I'm not for forcing people to buy things they don't want but in reality you need you have an option of impulse to increase sales. It could actually be the best way to speed up the progression into my perceived distant future ^^
2 comments:
An abstract, but interesting post.
I think you should check out a The Long Tail concept, might provide you with something to think about.
Hmm, I looked it up and I think it doesn't completely fit in. While Downloadable content is long tail in its range options. The point I'm getting at is that they're not building enough demand for it. They're waiting for people to come to them, not trying to entice people to use their services.
So while there are some long tail bonuses where people will go for stuff for the obscurity, the more main stream stuff could still use some work to make the overall thing more accepted.
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