famousringo said:
Well, how much of a niche do they have to be driven into before physical media are considered 'destroyed?' I'm sure you're right that there will always be some market for physical media, after all some albums are still getting pressed onto LPs. But outside of that tiny LP niche, iTunes has already become the single largest music retailer in the US with 25% of the market. DD is roughly 1/3 of the US music market, so how long before downloading songs is mainstream and CDs are the new LP? Digital distribution is all about finding the right model to incentivize the consumer. There are lots of advantages to be gained by both the consumer and the supplier, and also a lot of costs to be saved. Digital distributors have to be careful that they don't outweigh the advantages with new disadvantages like DRM restrictions, and that they deal the consumer into the cost savings rather than just trying to line their own pockets. For every successful model, there are ten failed DD models. All the major hardware manufacturers already have successful digital distribution models. They just need to be able to mainstream the model and bring in full retail games. The two big problems are going to be getting storage cheap enough and avoiding breaking the model through restrictions or greed. |
And the 3rd problem is that internet connection speeds, whilst fast, have yet to catch up in every region with the size of games. The world of DD is still a way off for the games industry. For music, and possibly films its nearing mainstream status, but games will still take a little longer thanks to the problems outlined. When DD for music reaches >50% we'll know that physical media is on its way "out", but that'l still take some time, and even longer for the film and games industries.
