Capcom says retail to be important for another 10-15 years, digital to come up fast and then plateau

The following comments come from Capcom Europe’s COO David Reeves…

“When you’re working for a company like Capcom and you’re talking to the biggest, smartest retailers around, there can be no doubt that they’ll be a big part of this business for at least ten to 15 years. You can get such reach and coverage by going with both retail and digital, that you cannot afford, in our position, to give up with physical distribution. I think you can double your revenue through an integrated digital/physical strategy, such as the prologue/epilogue model we employed for Dead Rising 2. I’ve got a feeling digital distribution will actually come up very, very quickly, as it’s doing, and then start to plateau. One factor in the transition between physical and digital is profitability. If you’re not producing a disc, you’re not shipping the disc, you don’t have a 35 per cent retail margin and you don’t have to worry about returns, then profitability is way in excess of anything you can do at retail. So in the cold light of day, from a publisher point of view, it is very profitable.”

Do you guys think retail has another 15 years in it, or are we already seeing the beginning of the end? Will retail be out sooner or later?

Link