Its too late for game retailers to start offering digital downloads

Online retailer Gameseek has warned other boxed game retailers that it’s too late to join the digital download market.

The website – which has been online since 2000 – scrapped its download service earlier this year due to low demand.

MD Stephen Staley told MCV that the success of established services such as Steam and Xbox Live means the digital window of opportunity has closed for physical retailers hoping to crack into that space.

It’s too late for traditionally boxed game retailers to start thinking about a download service, as known services such as Steam and Xbox Live are way ahead,” he said. The downloads only accounted to about 0.1 per cent of our business so it was not a big loss. However, we expected it to do better.”

Gameseek went live with game downloads in January 2008 in parnership with specialist online service Metaboli, before scrapping the offering this year.

We tried to push the service but there just was not enough demand for downloading games. We receive a lot of traffic to our site so we thought it would have been more successful than it was, but the service never really took off.”

The news comes after a host of independent retailers – including ShopTo and Barkman Computers – told MCV they wanted to add downloadable games to their product range.