am i the only person who like the disk of things they purchase.

The only gaming system at the moment without a lot of piracy, is the PS3, and that's strictly due to size. And what makes you think files sitting on your HD that you downloaded digitally, can't be copied?

Actually, I think the games have grown way more than 4x during the past 10 years, but we're quickly approaching the limits of economical feasibility. Unless the market grows in a really significant manner, there is little point in producing 200 gigs worth of content. True, there is always a possibility of something unexpected happening. In 10 years, we might be playing using 3D-hologram displays with content that is mainly direct recordings of real things, or we might be using some other technology which might cut costs a lot. For now, however, the production of high quality 3D-models and textures is so expensive that it sets the limits for game size.

But along the same lines, you can't look at the past to predict the future of digital distribution, either. The adoption rate of internet in general, and the development of bandwidth has been, simply put, astronomical, and currently there is no end in sight for the development. On the contrary, there are emerging technologies that promise to increase the bandwidth of existing fibers 10-100 fold. In 10 years time, who knows how much bandwidth there will be available for a normal consumer?

You Win The Thread!

I would like to thank everyone else for participating, good show.

Can I quote you in my sig?

lol.. you do realize that 99% of all Xbots LOVE THE PRODUCT AND NOT THE COMPANY right??

MS has f*&^cked up so many times this generation, and I'll be the first to admit and I've created half a dozen threads over the year picking on stupid things MS has done.

You're preaching to the choir...

they will make more money off of every game and so will the studios just think of all of the people they cut out of it -retailers -distribution -packaging -cd's the only downfall would be you would spend more on gigabytes but that will just keep becoming cheeper as technology advances

For M$, a tie-or close is a major win, considering Sony's grip on that continent. 360 is clearly poised to completely take over in the most important market in the world 9The good ole US of A) and then M$ can focus on Europe...forget the Japan, saki and sony are ingrained their.

lol, sure :)

 No, MS pushed VoD since 2006 or something. When Vista was introduced MS said something about the VoD-possibilities with it. HD-DVD was not Microsofts priority. Toshiba was the big name behind it, MS supported it. IF MS would have straightly focused on the HD-DVD, things would be different by now.

I mean Dreamworks / Paramount took 150 million Dollar to support HD-DVD exclusively. At the same time, MS was offering 45 billion Dollars for yahoo. There you see where their focus was. I know you can't compare these things, but it is interesting to see the relation moneywise. The formatwar was just a secondary theater of war for MS.

@topic:

I really love the VoD! I just downloaded Primal Fear with 420p and it took like 12-15 minutes after I received the message "the movie is playable" (my translation, I got it in German :D) I don't know about HD-Movies but it will be like 90 - 120 minutes I guess. I use a 3mbps connection. That is not very fast, even in Germany, but it works out pretty well. (one part is downloaded, rest will be downloaded while i am watching the movie)

The "Games on demand" is a good thing, too. I had hours of pure fun with Xbox Live Arcade so far. And it is just not true that good games got to be huge. GTA IV was and is a huge game and it fit on a single DVD with 9,6 GB. A 9,6GB download is not out of reach in the next generation or even this one. It would take around 7.5 hours with my connection. With a 25mbps connection I could play GTA IV after 1 hour of downloading. (hope my math is correct.) And memory-space is almost free today. This won't be a problem.

But GTA is not a great example. Let's take CoD4 or Halo or whatever. These games can just work out like the movies did. you download first 1-3 chapters of the game and during your play you are downloading the other chapters. This would be possible and very easy to use. (does the PSN work like this or do you have to download the whole game first? serious question) GTA would be a problem, because there are no chapters. Sandbox games would just take longer to download.

In a word: In countries with a decent online-infrastructure on demand is possible right now! Japan, north America, Australia, south Korea (???) and western Europe (Germany, UK, France, Netherlands, Belgium, scandinavia, austria, swiss, Spain, Italy (not sure about their internet connections)) do have the internet-connections it takes. But things will just get better with improving internet technology and spread bandwidth.