14 DAY TRIAL // Video game publisher Microsoft has announced that more than two thirds of the subscriptions for its Xbox Live Gold service are being bought at retail rather than using the online store of the company.
The company cited the statistic in order to show that it has a very close relation with its retail partners and plans to strengthen it in the future.
Robin Burrows, who is the marketing manager working for the Xbox Live service, has said that “We are very respectful of the retail environment, in that we have a window between the release of a retail game and the digital one. There’s no immediate plans to change that.”
He added, “We are continuing to talk to retail in different ways. We are looking to introduce new digital innovations to drive more business. We’ve been testing electronic software distribution in a couple of places.”
One innovation that Microsoft is apparently ready to test is allowing buyers to activate the Xbox Live points cards at the point of purchase, which implies the introduction of a new generation of tokens and some discussion with retailers.
Microsoft is not planning to launch any Xbox 360 video games on the same day via digital download and in retail stores.
The company is interested in making sure that gamers still visit retail stores in order to get the most recent releases and that those stores help sell as many Xbox 360 consoles as possible to those who spent time in them.
This position is probably an answer to a recent announcement from Sony, which has said that for the new PlayStation Vita it plans to put all video games on the PlayStation Store at the same time that they are offered in stores.
A number of analysts have speculated that the next generation of consoles might drop disks altogether and will deliver all content via digital distribution.