Could not agree more with the bolded.

Also just to be clear don't take my casual support of digital to mean that I'm a DRM loving individual rights hater. I just like the fact that it cuts out a middleman or at least in principle (and sometimes in practice) should allow lower prices and more money to devs instead of the bloodsucking publishers. But yes charging the same for DRMed digital without any perks over boxed is nutty and should be opposed. 

But I think the hope for a better digital experience which promotes creativity can be seen on sites like Kickstarter, the Humble Bundles, and to a smaller extent the Appstore, Android Marketplace, and Steam.

Things like EA's Origin make me shudder though.

As others have said, if he wants to carve out a niche he and his team can do just that. Nothing in the retail space is stopping him.

I would be sad if they did away with box games. I resell mine on eBay, and I would be quite saddened.

this is simple to explain, if some games are only available as download, i can only buy them as download so 100% of the sales for this game will be downloads. now if cod for example is available as retail as well most buy it as retail and only 20% of cod sales (or so) will compete against 100% of the game only available as download.

so if there wouldn't be retail anymore 100% of cod sales would be downloads, then you will see how the download charts will look...they will look alsmost as the retail charts.

or vice versa if there wouldn't be downloads there would be still every game as retail which would be on the market so there would be more new ips available at retail as there are atm because everyone with a new ip had to bring it in the shops and then more would do it and then the retail chart would have more new ips.

at the end it isn't as simple as i looks and that for both sides.

Slightly OT: But I think you inadvertently raise what I think many see as the key distinction between retail and digital; that being resalability. I think the argument is that publishers by using one-time codes, and in the case of the PC basically making boxed games unsellable are basically making it impossible for people like yourself to keep maintaining your right to sell a game you bought. At that point a boxed game is almost no different from a digital title. If that is the hypothetical future, I would rather avoid the cost of the box and retailer since it won't be exchangable anyways. That is why I think publishers want to destroy this key strength of retail games, while at the same time hoping they can get away charging the same price to consumers as they shift to digital.

Ideally digital should be cheaper, and boxed should be able to be transferable, but publishers seem to want it all.

No surprise that a PC-only developer wants retail to die, since hardly any PC games are sold at retail these days.

Alot of these developers who are openly wishing for the industry to go download / digital only might want to be careful what they wish for... if there comes a time when you can only play games via direct download or through some sort of cloud service, there's going to be ALOT of customers leaving the industry altogether.

I wonder how dominating the big boys of the gaming industry would be if they did concentrate full force on digital downloads. This guy should be careful what he wishes for. What he wants is already happening. Steam and Xbox Live have given me my fill of cool and original games, but next month is all retial month as I buy Phantom Breaker, Witcher 2, and Prototype 2. That alone should keep my busy for a good chunk of time.

but nowadays the vast majority of retail games, are also being sold on pc and available as digitial downloads. How are these "indie and small team" digital games able to compete with the huge budget "retail" titles. Its because so many dozens if not hundreds of brand new ips are released each year on digital services like steam, that eventually someone actually makes something that is really freaking good, and that product ends up selling a lot. There is so much "shoveware" being produced, that some of it is bound to be good.

You could see it in the early years of the wii when it was very very popular. It was the console to develop cheap games on, and while a lot of them were utter garbage, some of them ended up being creative, crazy and imaginitive new ips. IMO innovation is mainly being hurt because of the high cost of development, but also because of costs involved with selling games on retail. Obviously development costs will be high regardless of the distribution if you want your game to look pretty, but regardless of what the exact numbers are, developers/publishers get a much bigger share of the profits from digital sales than retail sales, and thus are able to take greater risks because its easier to make their money back.

I actually think it's because the vast majority of purchases for the big-budget games are still retail. As someone else said earlier in this thread, a big retail/digital title has to split its sales between the two mediums (a split that's generally skewed heavily towards retail), while every DD-only sale goes exclusively to one side of the ledger.

Additionally, I believe that ranking (relatively) low on the retail list still brings you far more revenue than ranking high on the digital list. While I agree with both your assertions that The Cream Generally Rises and that high costs are detrimental to experimentation, I'm arguing that destroying the retail venue won't lead to noticeably greater experimentation in gaming. Instead, those retail blockbusters (which still cost just as much to make and market as ever!) will migrate (most of) their sales to the digital realm, so the digital chart will look largely like the retail chart does now. The line might be drawn a bit closer to permitting experimentation (although the digital arena is already up and running, so I don't see how destroying retail games will improve what we have now), but ultimately the big picture will look the same.

I'm also hesitant to ascribe lower publishing costs to the digital model in the long run. The publisher's still going to want to get paid, and I don't see digital altering this part of the equation much. Meanwhile, the Steam/Origin/Whoever's of the world are also going to want their cut for the privilege of using their digital store. Logically, these distributors' cuts should be smaller than retailers'. Logically, a DD copy of a PC game should cost less than a physical copy.

I normally spend up to 30€ in budget edition retail games (I almost never buy them just released). I would spend at most 5€ for budget editions and 10€ for new games downloading them.
And recently I bought Torchlight in a budget edition, physical format, cover-mounted on a gaming magazine. Without budget edition and physical format, I'd have skipped it altogether, it was a cheap and welcome, but not essential addition to my game library. If they don't want my money, no problem, I will survive.