True. It comes down to what I'm saying. If you can hold many games on your hdd, that's great but if you need to stock 50 gigs with uncompressed audio/graphics/etc, you have problems. One of the great thing with the N64 and DS is that they need to keep only what's important and they need to compress the data.

Digital distribution is the future. It's going to become popular. If it overtakes physical media I don't know. I do know that the gaming market is expanding and not everyone can distribute with hard copies.

Most of your points are applicable. Hard drive space is never going to be a problem. PC gamers have been dealing with it since 1980 (roughly).

It's also actually not easier to go to the store. You have a 30 seconds worth of clicking versus 5-30 minutes of driving in which you make multiple life critical decisions.

When they fix the copyright law in America (or where ever it is a problem) not having a "physical copy" won't be a problem.

Kids growing up today grow up with computer monitors attached to the their retinas. I think kids are plenty comfortable roaming the web and buying online.

They're rolling out fiber everywhere. I'm ahead of the curve but my max download speed is 1.7 MB/s. I rarely wait for things on the internet.

You're right about one thing, this isn't a 5 year plan. Digital distribution is gonna need more time than that to claim supremacy.

@Godat, No video game ever released or that is ever going to be released can justify uncompressed data. It's ridiculous that people think this. Nobody will ever notice the difference with proper compression.

Exclusive digital distribution of full-retail games would be pretty, um, exclusive.

Just like a game being exclusive to a console it limits who will be able to buy and play it.

It's whatever is more economical. When enough people have the ability to download, more games will be download only - encouraging more people to upgrade.

I don't like it personally. Put it this way, if one day DD is the norm and most games have to be downloaded this means that the consoles are suddenly restricted to not only the developed nations of the world but to the richer who can afford a good net connection without a download limit.

Yeah in a few years this might be okay for the US or UK but what about Ukraine, Poland or India?

And costs of ISP just subsidise costs of packaging in the end.

It's never gonna be 100%, because that would block access to several customers.

But in developed nations it will be the majority.

I agree with your first comment.   As for the latter, I'm a bit of a collector, and I like having my games in my hands, cover, booklet, and all.  :P

Also, HDDs are far too unreliable, imo, and given the apparent lust for DRM on things digitally downloaded, it could make redownloading what you already bought a real pain in the ass.  Not to mentiont you can't share games with friends.

With DD, ownership rights are on a very thin line.

As I've said numerous times Digital Distribution will never be the norm because retailers make way too much money off of video game sales. Hell they complain about Gamestop selling used games haha becuase it takes sales from them. Unless retailers have some stake in it they will do whatever it takes to keep video games on a hard disc.

IMO 10GB should be the limit right now when it comes to DD exclusives. 10GB is not enough to waste a whole blu-ray on and it is not to much harddrive space. I don't think it is that big of a deal if it takes half a day to download I have plenty to do otherwise. Personaly I would really like see all third party games that don't take advantage of blu-ray released simultaneously on PSN.

Digital Destribution blows IMO. I like my games on CD's, with boxes and manuals. I like holding something permanent and real.