When do you predict we’ll we see a non-physical media future?
Depends where you live: If you live in Korea, it’s already happened, if you live in China, it’s already happened. That’s an easy prediction to make: there is undoubtedly a generation of kids alive on the planet today who will never purchase a physical media package for any of their digital entertainment.

When do you think the first traditional console will go non-physical?
If you’d asked me that question a year ago I’d have been more bullish. But it’s interesting that SCEJ confirmed the… not cancellation, but sort of demise of PSP Go – which I think was a fantastic experiment and I applaud Sony for having at least tried it. I don’t think that’s the end of media-less consoles. On my desk around me I have an iPhone and an iPad and I’m looking really hard at them but I can’t find a disc slot anywhere. 

The console companies, if they wanted to take true market leadership, could do it in the next generation. There’s no reason why Microsoft and Sony, in particular, couldn’t push that change for the next iteration of their major consoles. Nintendo I think will be a little bit further behind, traditionally they have not been at the bleeding edge of technology and I think that Nintendo has got less experience in building their own online infrastructure, unlike Microsoft who’s probably in the lead and Sony who’s catching up fairly quickly.

Where do you think Apple will be in the market a decade from now?
At this trajectory, if you extrapolate the market-share gains that they are making, forward for ten years – if they carry on unrestrained in their growth, then there’s a pretty good chance that Apple will be the games industry.

In what sense?
In the proliferation of devices – you’ve got iPhones, iPads, iPods, which are all part of the same ecosystem; the speed at which Apple sold 15 million iPads is phenomenal. And the number one activity on an iPad, according to some reports, is games, and I think that will only continue.

The fact that the consumer purchase and discovery mechanism is so well integrated – you see something on the App Store, you click a button, the product delivers to your device. That end-to-end shopping experience, if you want to call it that, has been so elegantly built by Apple and they will continue to refine it. 

I probably buy more through Amazon, in terms of value, than any other retailer throughout the year. I find that the rest of the world – meaning Apple, Amazon, Steam – are showing the future of how content will be consumed, adding to that NetFlix and LoveFilm and the like, and that console companies run the risk of becoming a little antiquated unless they change their business model.

What sort of effect do you think this will have on software? Will companies like EA still be in a strong position?
I think new leaders can emerge because the economic factors are different. One of the strengths that EA has at the moment is its physical distribution: they have retail relationships with tens of thousands of retailers around the world and a very efficient distribution mechanism for getting boxes into those stores. But as time goes on, that will become less of a competitive advantage. I think that as the power of retailers decreases proportionate to the whole industry, the strength of the physical distribution force that companies like EA – or to a certain extent Activision, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo – that power starts to be diluted a little bit.

http://www.next-gen.biz/features/phil-harrison-future

Like I said in the other thread: The quicker we get there the better, it would help SOOOO many medium to small developers make more money without the need to split what little they may earn with retailers and publishers. They can easily publish thier own games. EA and Activision having less power is wonderful too.

Derp.

yeahh is comment about gaming and apple is broken though... it's like the argument that the average player is 32 years old.... while fundamentaly true this is because it counts the uncountable number of secretaries that play solitaire at the office as gamers....
same applies here... it's not because you have 15million idiots playing angry birds that it makes apple a viable gaming company or platform..... people have been playing games on everything they could play games on for decades.... unless apple decides to do quality products in terms of hardware their is no way it can replace PCs and living room consoles in the states of things.... maybe handhelds.... but I still highly doubt that anything that an iPad can handle gives an hard on to a 3DS or PS vita owner..... even with iPad3 or 4 if you keep the same "improvement" (hum hum *choke*) curve we've seen with iPod and iPhone.... and untill the opposite is true they are still way behind and insignificant in the OS market for PC or phones.... at least for now....

Apple will be games industry... lol...

Gamers would just need to buy an overpriced system every year or less. Screw the 5-10 year plan, it is obvious the 1 year plan is the best for gamers.  I wish Apple was as relevant now as they were during the 90s.  Maybe then the gaming "media" would get off their nuts.  I swear it sounds like every so called developer, "media" and "analyst" wants to give Apple a blowjob every time they talk about them.

If a next gen console went DD only, they would hemorrhage most of their consumer base over to their competitors and have zero shelf space (just like the PSP Go did); how in the heck would that be true market leadership???

It'd be pretty sad to see a DD-only gen, it really fucks up retailers and distributors... it won't do well... you can't make serious cash selling only hardware - the shelf space it'll eat up will simply not be profitable enough to be worth it.

the day home consoles go digital download only is the day i wont buy a new console, and will instead stick to the physical media systems.

I was reading earlier in EGM when I was at Barnes & Noble about a college student who needed money trying to sell his steam account valued around 1.8k.   Steam disabled his account but after complaining he got it back with a message to not try and sell his account again.  Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft all have the same terms in their digital downloads.

If Microsoft gets their way in the future a DD only gen wouldn't be to far off.