bardicverse on 25 May 2009
@dunno - Nice, a lot of points that linked up with my thoughts, especially regarding serial # matching HD to console unit. I could do the traditional thing and say "Who can possibly use more than 50GB for a game?" and totally be laughed at in 10 years from now, so I won't say it ;)
With TB drives going for under $100 now, maintaining an extensive digital catalog in stores would be a minimal expense. Within the next 5 years we might see the first Petabyte drives (1,000 Terabytes). If one drive can hold 40,000 25GB games, I'm sure that this would be sufficient for a local digital distribution method.
If you take a retailer like Toys R Us or Best Buy, they could tear down their racks, install kiosks - one set for local download for purchased games, and another set that has demos of the games for download. This would allow people to demo the first few levels of a game, or whatnot, so they can try before they buy. Since the demos are local copies anyhow, they could also have stations where you can browse through the demos and play them in the shop. Basically, I could see a video game section looking more like the music sampling sections at FYE or something like that.
On the point of the retailer usurping more profit from the lower manufacturing/distribution costs, they are relatively restricted by the MSRP, so they couldn't push it too far without getting flak from the publishers.
Very cool points overall though, and thus far, I can't see any other loopholes, minus for the fact that this method would outright destroy the used game market.
