When Sony debuted the PlayStation 4 to the public, they were proud to inform everyone that they will still be selling physical game discs despite the crystal clear eventual digital download future of video gaming as forever proven by the utter success of the Steam client on the Personal Computer. Strangely, Sony keeps producing these really awful PlayStation Network Store digital download commercials. Remember that one from earlier this year? Yeah, it was stupid. The latest one that I stumbled upon while channel hopping on twitch.tv is a lot worse. In this one, a guy got a text from his supposed gamer girlfriend asking him if he got games for them to play when they meet up later for a date. So the guy immediately bought Bioshock Infinite - well, why wouldn't he get a multiplayer game? I guess the girl just likes to watch and that Sony's marketing people are pretty darn clueless about video games - from the PSN store and while the game was downloading, something that we know can take a whole entire day because of the weird bandwidth limit of the PS3 network, he cleaned up his house and made some snacks for them. Everything was ready by the time his girlfriend arrived, oh yeah. Of course I was rolling my eyes throughout the entire time but you know what? I like digital download so any attempt at promoting it will have to be kind of okay with me. The more pressing problem here is that Sony lacks the conviction to really push the digital distribution revolution. I really don't understand what they are afraid of. Valve has made a lot of money from such schemes and Sony fanboys will pretty much eat anything that is thrown at them. Since they are willing to pay money to access online gameplay on the PS4, you know they would have been fine with the PS4 having only digital download games.
"Why don't you nibble on the fruit platter, sweetheart, while I make love to Elizabeth."
Update Note: 09/13/2013 - I saw the commercial again today and I was able to lavish on the little details that I missed the last time I saw it. At the end of the commercial, the guy asked "Do you want to play?" and the girl answered "Do you have to ask?". So it was obvious that they were planning to participate in some multiplayer thus it is confirmed that the marketing department failed hard here.
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