G-Commerce

Jul 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Markkus Rovito

Video games have taught us a lot over the years. For example, gorillas love to throw barrels, and staying up for 50 hours straight staring at a screen feels a lot like a mild peyote trip. However, we're hoping that video games may even teach people to pay for music again. Two recent and popular console games, Rockstar Games Grand Theft Auto IV and Sony SingStar for PS3 have tinkered with in-game purchasing of music, but there's still a ways to go before your Xbox resembles the second coming of Tower Records.

In Grand Theft Auto IV, your character carries a mobile device, and when you're not flipping through the details of contract hits or talking to your lowlife mook friends, you can use it find the names of the more than 150 songs playing on the 16 in-game “radio stations.” Tagging songs and then logging into Rockstar's social network site will let you preview and then buy DRM-free MP3s of those songs from Amazon. While this is a great idea and a first for video games, it's still a very convoluted system.

SingStar, a karaoke game for PS3, includes 30 songs and videos on the game disc to sing along to. When those songs get stale, you can choose from more than 200 songs and videos to download for $1.49 each, straight from within the game. The direct download system is great, but you don't actually get the songs in a form that you can listen to elsewhere.

It seems like everyone is so far missing a great opportunity to sell direct MP3 downloads from within games. Modern game consoles have Internet connections, hard drives and a USB port — everything you need to purchase music and take it with you on a flash drive to use elsewhere. Gamers tend to be a captive audience for music in games, often spending many hours with them interrupted only for emergency bathroom breaks and sometimes, unfortunately, not even then. Here's hoping that the music labels learn something from video games too, and start selling direct downloads in games.

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