Limbo dev: The retail model is broken

The boss of developer Playdead has said the boxed games model has always been and still is broken”.

Dino Patti, the co-founder of the studio that developed downloadable hit Limbo, told Eurogamer at the GameCity6 festival that he wants format holders to embrace the download space even more”.

"The retail model has always been and still is broken, from a developer’s point of view,” he said. Driving discs in a big van all over the world is really inefficient. I don’t understand how anyone can make money out of this.

Driving a truck to Japan just to get it delivered to people when they can get it from the net? Hopefully the new consoles will embrace the download space even more.

There will be discs for a long time from now, but the world has adopted download. So many publishers are pushing [discs] and there are so many channels which won’t die easily. In terms of money, it’s still bigger than download.”

Patti added that boxed games should also be less reliant on installations.

All the new games today also need to be installed,” he said. Why did I get a console if the games need to be installed? That really sucks. That’s a PC.

It should be more like plug and play. The first consoles were cartridges. When it takes one hour to install Gran Turismo 5? I don’t know. Obviously it improves performance, but they should be able to build consoles with better performance from the disc drive.”

Limbo first arrived as a downloadable game last year. It hit shelves earlier this year as part of Xbox Live Hits Collection, a boxed Xbox 360 three-game pack also including Trials HD and Splosion Man.