How To Create Digital Downloads

Physical copies of Fallout 4 will still require a digital download

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The overwhelming majority of PC games these days are sold digitally rather than in boxed sets, but there are still users that prefer the solidity of a jewel case, have limited Internet bandwidth, or very slow connections. Given this, it's still fairly common to see the option to order a boxed copy of a game, or to receive a DVD if you purchase the "Deluxe / Collector's Edition. Fallout 4, from Bethesda Softworks, bucks this trend — while the game still ships in a physical box, you won't be able to actually play it unless you log into Steam and download part of the game from online servers.

As our sister site Geek.com reports, this is different from the consoles, both of which ship the entire game on Blu-ray. On the PC side, the DVD you receive will require an activation code before it can be used. According to Pete Hines, Bethesda's VP of marketing, there are two reasons for this. Writing on Twitter, Hines stated the following:

"PC requires activation on Steam. Console does not. Console ship on Blu-rays, PC ships on DVDs."

When pressed for further information, Hines cited piracy as the reason Bethesda decided on this strategy, and elaborated with the below:

PeteTweet

I'm sympathetic to Bethesda's desire to prevent piracy. Games like Fallout 4 are enormous projects that involve the efforts of hundreds of people working for years. The company absolutely deserves to earn an income on its product, and playing a game you didn't pay for does deprive the creator of the profit of a sale while enriching the pirate, who gains access to the content.

What I'm also for, however, is common sense. Forcing people to download part of a game because you think it will defray piracy for a vanishingly small amount of time is a silly way to safeguard sales. The Pirate Bay is full of ripped copies of every title that Hines mentions. According to a certain major torrent site that rhymes with "Eyelet Spay," the first ripped versions of Skyrim appeared on 11/11/2011 — the day Skyrim launched. Clearly no one was prevented from downloading Skyrim in any meaningful way.

Requiring a one-time authentication of a game code for a physically purchased copy of a title is annoying, but validating a game CD key isn't really a problem for any but the most Internet-deprived. Requiring that the consumer download a huge chunk of data from the Internet obviates the point of buying a game copy in the first place. The entire point of having offline installation media is to ensure that you can install and play a game, even if the Internet is unavailable.

If the gap between Blu-ray and DVD is the reason why the title has to ship partly online, Bethesda should've either packaged a multi-DVD game or offered a Blu-ray option. Forcing physical customers to jump through multiple hoops just isn't the way to win goodwill. If you're going to distribute a physical copy of the game, either distribute the entire title or don't bother.