Yep Gotta Agree.

Wow. Consoles may stop existing in the traditional sense of what we know since straming games not only eliminates the need for a disc, but eliminates the need for hard drive space or any physical console at all.

True change will need to take place for the next- next gen.

the Xbox 1080 and PS5 will need to be somehting different entirely.

It seems we are literally on the path to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRJXLu3YVpM&feature=related

Yeah, but you can still say "Playstation" and people think of a console. Going forward, that's what I think will change. Steam seems a pretty good indicator that even on an open platform like PC, people will gravitate towards a more closed platform-on-a-platform if it's a good one. Valve has done a really good job of making Steam enticing, even without many (if any) exclusive games.

Wont happen, PC has already demonstrated that digital gaming is very possible and can be a strong market. Even industries that for years held onto physical media, music and movies, are transitioning to digital media. Movies will take longest of all industries to go all digital because of ever growing file sizes and eventually UHD and SUHD resolutions (1440p to 4k p).

Its because people do not have to remember a dozen passwords and know their media is safe.

Okay but how can we fight this? Can we prolong the era of physical media somehow?

shut down the internet? i think physical media will end up falling into an expensive niche market. It wont 100% die, it just wont be as prominent as it has been.

edit: its like vinyl records. Its niche now, but its market still exists and does spike up every once in a while. It is still a superior piece of audio tech for a major reason. If Blu-ray audio took the market like it should be or the high end audio codecs take over the worthless mp3 codecs you might be able to keep physical music around for a while. But people prefer music files to be under 10mbs so we wont ever see good digital audio as "omg that song is 70MBs, thats to big of a file for my 10mbps internet to handle" mentality people have.

1. pspGo failed 2 years in the past while this article is talking 10ish years in the future.  Besides, much of the issue with the pspGo wasn't that people won't download but that the pspGo didn't give you access to all of the psp's library a very glaring issue.

2. Exhibt A: music sales.  physical sales of music dropped below 50% in 2009 in favor of digital.

3. Don't even bother with the file size argument, netflix streaming, itunes apps, xbla, psn, wiiware, OnLive all point to means of digital distribution already availible and the services are only going to get better.

4. We are already well on our way into digital distribution.  EA just critizied NPD citing 1/5 of their revenue is going to be digital this year.

so in conclusion, physical sales are obviously not going to go away over night just like CDs didn't go away over night but the market trend is clear ... we are moving to a digital distribution in all forms of media; video games included.

That might be a nice convenience, but I think Steam's great deals and large community has a lot more to do with it. The community is probably the biggest draw of all. I always see people bitch about paying for Live when most of the games are on PS3 or PC with free online multiplayer, but they continue to do it because that's where their friends play.

1. the PSPgo was more testing the waters of the market. The PSN shows that market exists, its just not big enough for full digital handheld consoles yet.

2 - 4. read my posts above. physical music will never actually die. Even vinyl records still have a fairly strong niche market that has constant resergances due to people's mentalities on digital file size.