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SvennoJ on 26 March 2013
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Adinnieken said:
SvennoJ said:
Adinnieken said:
If for Xbox 8 Microsoft is essentially using the disc as the means of distributing the software, not providing the ability to play from it, than it is likely that not far down the road will be the ability to walk into a store with a USB thumb drive, purchase a game, copy it to your thumb drive, and install it on your computer.

Go into Best Buy, log into a kiosk, stick your thumb drive in, slide your credit card in, and your game of choice is copied to your thumb drive. The only thing you have to do is stick it in your console where the license is tied to your device, and you're off to the races.

I don't think anyone is going to invest in the infrastructure needed for such a kiosk system. It hasn't happened for music, movies or tv shows. Without the ability to resell the used games, shops have no benefit at all to invest in a kiosk system. Psp go kiosks, where are they?

If I as a retailer make ... 10% of each sale on the kiosk why wouldn't I want it?

It saves shelve space.  It saves on inventory I need to manage.  Once people get acclimated, I don't even need an employee to manage it.  Just a kiosk that customers can walk up to, do their business, and leave.

High initial costs. A secure software system to handle 'printing' games won't be cheap.
Low usage expectations. Digital music kiosks do exist here and there, hardly anybody uses them, and you don't even need to buy extra transfer storage media for that.
Is it going to burn a blu-ray on the spot? Or does the customer have to invest in a fast writing 50gb usb stick for transfer? (The fastest SSD cards take 20 sec per gb atm, over 6 minutes for a 20gb game, about 10 minutes for an 8 speed blu-ray burner)
Low user experience. Why go to a store to browse on a machine, plus only 1 user can print / browse at a time.

It makes more sense to have display cases on the shelves to browse. Then when you want a digital version (linked to your account, no need to have the disc in the drive) you get a cheap disc in a sleeve with a code to take home. A shop can pre-burn the discs and have a secure machine to dispense the codes to save on shipping costs.

Anyway what incentive do shops have to actively help eliminate the 2nd hand market?
What incentive do customers have (apart from not needing the disc on startup) to get a one time use disc over one that they can resell later?