Do you realize they can't sell digital items less than retail or the retail stores will simply stop carrying their items?

They have all digital items - like Xbox Live Arcade (cept for some titles.)  Where they are the only ones, or nearly the only ones selling them.

Its a business decision, not a mean/stingy thing.

So that means They have to charge 10 - 20 dollars more for a digital game? Can't count the number of times a game has been $30 on XBL or PS Store when it's $20 at Best Buy or Walmart

Kind of a myopic point of view, but understandable.

How many people on VGC are current users of Steam? There you go. Media-less gaming functioning today. Functioning years ago. I've been doing the vast majority of my PC gaming on Steam since about 2007.

"Unlimited" HDD storage for game installs and the idea of having installer disks that have to be in the DVD tray for the security DRM check suddenly seems like a big annoyance. However, I do not maintain several terabytes worth of HDD space simply so I can have the convenience of immediate access to the terabytes worth of games that are in my Steam catalog. I have to pick and choose which ones I want to keep installed because gaming is not the only thing I use my PC or Mac for.

When it comes to my consoles, it's even less practical to have all my games installed, not that they would even fit on a 500GB HDD or a 1TB HDD. So until consoles are able to network with a home server that has TB worth of game data installed on it, sorry... but optical media must remain. Either that or it's choose which games you have immediate access to or simply don't buy/play so many games, which is no solution at all.

While I like, make that love, the ability to access my entire catalog of games from any PC with Steam installed on it, I still have to go through the process of downloading and installing before I can play anything, which sometimes takes hours.

And as long as console media functions as more than just a PC style installer/DRM check, give me the BD disks that don't have to install everything onto a console HDD. It's not that I like staring at all those game boxes lined up on my shelves, but until consoles grant access to unlimited local storage, or networks with the ability to grant access to full game downloads and installs faster than it takes to insert a disk and do a partial install, I don't want to ditch high capacity media.

Pretty much; yeah.

Until everyone has network speeds that can download a full game and install it faster than one can open a game case, insert disk and install it, AND consoles have multiple terabytes worth of local storage for those consumers who buy and play a lot of games, most consumers are going to prefer having physical media. 

They don't have to, but it's one of the reasons why network services like PSN, XBL or Steam exist: so publishers don't have to deal with inventory, which includes having to dump inventory from time to time to make room for new product. 

Yes, everyone who picks up games at cut rate prices (myself included) reaps the benefits of inefficient inventory, or poor predictions on sales relative to production, but it's hardly an efficient system where one plays the waiting game for a game they want to go on sale or hit the clearance shelf. 

DD services do offer sales as well and I've reaped the benefits there too. Often when I want to pick up a game, it simply boils down to whether inventory is high and physical copies are being sold cheap, or if there's a good sale on PSN or Steam.

When it comes to Steam, I think I can just about count the number of games I've paid full retail price for on one hand, and that's with 130 or so titles in my catalog. 

Nope, but they might be bound by contract at a set price aka 'suggested retail price' SRP, and the larger retailers can discount beyond that point for a period of time or promotion. 

Watch Amazon's discounts, they usually can beat anyone, because they are so large and add special provisions to their contracts. 

It's also the reason why the game cost about the same at the Microsoft Store vs Gamestop, even-though MS keeps more of the profit if you buy from them.

Other sure, a digital game cost significantly less to distribute than a physical media game.  But if they can keep the transition slow, then they can keep the prices closed to the same rate.

Do you really think in 10 years that we will still buy buying game disk in stores?

So you are going to skip the PS3, PS4 and Xbox One?  As all of those do that.

It's acutally for the benifit of the developers.  They complained about the requirment of having to run of a disk on the Xbox 360.

NHL 12 (not 13) is $59.99 on PS Store. $29.99 at Gamestop new $24.99 used. You would be a complete retard to buy it digital. And many people feel that way about buying digital from PS Store or XBL. That you are actually throwing money away when you buy digital on consoles

There are some very big reasons to sell physical games when the internet exists: retail games are huge downloads and are only going to get bigger, which is going to require even more hard drive space then what current consoles are offering. I mean, we are talking about massive games upwards of 20 to as much as 50 gigs for some of these retail titles. PS3 already has games of this size. Uncharted 3 is so massive I couldn't even fit it on my hard drive along with the other PS3 games I wanted to download, and I have a 160 gig drive! Now imagine a console generation where blu ray is the standard across all gaming platforms and games the size of Uncharted 3 become the norm....even that 500 gig hard drive the One is sporting is going to start to look tiny.

And then there is the simple fact that many people don't even have the download speed for these games! Why is it that so many of these industry proffesionals live in a bubble where all of their customers have access to high speed internet?

Datacaps seem to be a foreign concept to a lot of people it seems.