Come on Nintendo, make me want to buy your consoles.

No HDD and games tied to a single piece of hardware is NOT the way to do it.

From a business perspective, it makes sense. For all the clamoring some folks like to do re: digital distribution, it's clearly still a minority of the console market. I remember the guys who made Shadow Complex complaining that for all the marketing it got, its sales were still too small to pull in more than just a modest profit. But this still lets smaller games games get published, while giving them some (probably very limited) exposure at retail. And there's always the off chance that the console market will follow the PC market in a decade or two; lord knows consoles now seem to be more and more like neutered PCs.

From a personal perspective, I'm mostly into it. I already use the USB Loader for my Wii, and while I have to hang onto all the discs in case something goes wrong I certainly can't argue with the convenience. Plus the niche games are more likely to still release this way. On the flipside, there are probably going to be more games which will never get a physical release. As someone who prefers the boxed copy, that's unfortunate. I'm already wondering what's going to happen to all my WiiWare games once the service dies down, although with luck that won't be until at least another generation.

I'm too lazy to find the quote now, but I believe Iwata said something about online games not costing the same as retail versions. One of the 9124 quotes from the investor's meeting

Khan, that's what I was banking on when I first read about the Nintendo Network. But when I read it in the investors' briefing, like Rainbird I thought it'll be bond to the console, not the account. It's a horrible way to deal with the merchandising, and I'll definitely be buying the games retail if it's like that.

It's already tough enough buying the same games many times on the virtual console and Wiiware, but luckily the pain is reduced since it's the eighth of the price. But here I'll probably never download games as it is. They'll probably address that mid-gen, but if they don't people will have to pressure them about it, it's ridiculous.

That's not the way a market leader should operate, they need to listen to their customers more...

@theRepublic. As far as I can tell, Starcraft II can be played on any machine, as long as you're logged into battle.net and have the game installed. It's the right way to do it imho, we are sick of giving our money away repeatedly and need more ownership of our purchases.

Iwata noted that downloaded software will not be able to be shared between systems. Nintendo plans on keeping its suggested pricing of physical and digital software the same, but retailers will be able to set the prices of the software they sell as usual, including digital content.

http://ds.ign.com/articles/122/1223880p1.html

If you can't connect to the internet, or the servers are down you are probably screwed though.  And what happens when the game is no longer supported?  That is not something that you really need to worry about with Starcraft, but for smaller digital services it is going to be a problem at some point.

As far as I can tell, the agreements for digital games make it so you are basically renting the game.  Physical copies will be better unless something drastic changes.  I don't expect that to happen.  It gives the company more control and removes it from the customer.  Companies will not give up that power unless some law changes that, most likely.

The lawyers are certainly hellbent on making that the case, yes.

We're talking about retail games offered digitally though, we aren't talking about smaller digital services as far as I'm concerned.

If Blizzard can do it, so can Nintendo. They are just not doing their homework by looking at how others are doing it, or they just don't care enough about our satisfaction.

inncorrect -- unless you were intending to troll me.

digital has it's advantages that i value.  i like being about to switch between games without swapping disc/carts.  i like that i don't have to find a place to store all of this stuff, i already have waaay too many bookshelves of old games wasting space. 

Of course if you don't care about digital purchases of retail games you have no valid argument. Some of us like having everything stored on a server, and just downloading the code. It's practical, it's HW-less, it's easy, I don't have to go to the store if I don't feel like it.

In general, I prefer digital accounts, and that's just how I rol.