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greenmedic88 on 21 January 2012
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happydolphin said:

As a whole, yes. They are life support in a sense and satisfy a portion of diet like Jay said. If I were to tell you two consoles have respectable exclusives, but one also offers more interesting dl'able games, without deeper knowledge, which would you go for? Also, if I were not a fan of Sony's games, I'd certainly rather a 360 for the alternate kinect/XBLA diet, easy. It's what you would call value-add.

 

And what of the day when all becomes software-only? What then?

There's a difference between buying games because you already bought the platform and store/portal that gives you access to more content and buying a console to play budget downloadable titles or in an even more far-fetched scenario, to buy a specific downloadable budget title that had no real marketing behind it like most DD titles. Big difference.

Now it's a very viable argument to say that a console owner may continue to buy budget titles off PSN or XBL after their interest has peaked with the console and $60 game purchases are far and inbetween, but again, this is quite the opposite of hardware selling.

And the day when all software becomes available via DD, which will happen long before software becomes exclusively available through DD, there will still be a multi-tiered structure for game prices. $60 titles will still cost... $60. And these same titles will still see the same multi-milliion dollar marketing campaigns used today to generate interest and sell the game. Budget titles will still be budget titles to include next to no or no marketing campaign in sync with their low development costs. 

Also, the day when software becomes exclusively available through DD will in all likelihood only be when retail outlets stop supporting the video game industry. While there's always an argument for PSN and XBLA cards sold at retail, those are essentially for those who either don't have credit (kids or those will horrendous credit rating) or are too paranoid to pay for anything online. I honestly don't know who would argue that enough consumers would still be buying redeemable cards at retail outlets to make it worth their while for their continued support of the industry.