Or at least potentially it does. I recently bought a PS1 and it rocks! I've bought a large selection of games, mainly because they cost under £3 each. If all games are to be digitally distributed then this delight will be a thing of the past. Many VC game are more expensive to download than buy the originals second hand. I appreciate this is not the case with rare games and I am very thankful (yay sin and punishment!) but I'm mildly worried about the future for retro heads.

Below is the absolute worst case scenario.

Underground classics (for exapmle Braid, which I haven't played but really want to) will never have hard copies of them made. They will not be available to download on next gen hardware. The current generation ends and you can no longer download them. The game is now lost forever!!

As I said, above is the worst case scenario, but it's kind of scary. There are countless games I didn't discover until way after the console they were on. Thoughts?

Your logic is a bit flawed...

You cannot stick an NES cartridge in an SNES, yet here are tons of NES games still alive and being sold today, regardless of the cartridges that contained the games years ago.

Braid could be downloadable on the next generation Xbox, you don't know things won't carry over.

And yeah you might pay more for a game than an old used copy, but A) it won't degrade or break because it's digital, and B) it's stored in the console so you don't have to lug around a bunch of cartridges, I'm sure plenty of people appreciate this.

And you don't have to go around looking for it; just go online, buy it and play instantly.
Best way to get impulse buyers.

The only part of digital distribution that sucks in my mind is that you can't resell your digital copy. But im sure this will be possible in the near future...

Braid will not be lost...what makes you think xbox live arcade will not continue next gen? Also it should be available for PC and that platform never changes.

Having a hard copy of the game sucks too...half of my genesis games don't work anymore without extensive "blowing". Old disks skip since they are scratched... so river can flow in both directions for that argument.

Lies, sir. That is the future to cut out the greedy middleman that drives up dev prices and limits increased return. :)

 How the hell would that be possible? Digital distribution platforms are usually run by the developers and publishers, there would be no gain for them for allowing people to "sell" there game back to them.

Whatsmore, this would kill sales much more easily than second hand hard copies, mainly because the risk of getting a damaged copy of the game is null. You'd essentially be buying a brand new copy of the game for a discount price. No money-loving corporation is going to allow that.

Anyways, I'm all for digital distribution. I used to prefer hardcopies because I liked being able to have the box. The PS3s video/images/background music system it has for games far supasses as boring, flat, image on the case.

I'll probably write my own launcher to work with all my DD games on my PC, to give me the same experience as what I get on the XMB.

While I agree with you that this does not benefit the companies in any way at the moment, I think that users will figure out a way to do this and companies will have to follow or lose out on the deal.

I already play a game on xbox live...and when I'm done and finished I pass the rights to the game to my freinds xbox who gives me the digital rights to another game he bought... I know that its not meant to work like this, but since there is no other alternative at the moment for 360 users, this is all I can do. Since they use "microsoft, sony and wii points" there can be a way to allow re-sale of the game to which the seller would set any price and the console company would tack on an extra 100 points...that way everyone gets something.

This is how my digital euthopia would work. :)

One of the worst parts is the insane price companies charge for classic games, last gen there were classic collections that could be bought for $20 and they had a lot of games now its 4-10 dollars each this gen.

 But why would someone buy a game first hand, when they could purchase it second hand and get it cheaper, with no losses in terms of quality.

What I'm asking is... why would any platform owner offer any service like this officially?

I think that game gifting, and guest passes (a la Steam) are the closesrt things we're going to get to your dream.

Shame.

DD will get the ability to transfer copies of games to other people. It's in the works, and your going to see it within 6 months. Call it "insider information" ;)

As for the OP's argument. It's very flawed, and illogical to think that current companies are going to randomly shut off their massive cash flows when next-gen rolls around.

If/when next-gen rolls around, don't you think that it'd be in their best interest to offer the DD catalogues of their predicessor? I mean, that would show that when the X720 comes out, there would potentially be hundreds of games available at launch through XBLA, and XBO. Not only this, it gives them massive profitability from the get-go as new users flock to classic titles.

The advantage of DD is the fact that it's modular. Look at what all of the Big-3 companies are offering: Wii offers Virtual Console, which has tons of ancient games, as well as WiiWare. PSN offers PS1 games + PSN games. Microsoft offers XBLA games and classic XBO games. Why would next-gen be any different? The titles already exist. All they'd need was either emulated or some other means to maintain the fact that they're forward-compatible with the new systems, which I doubt would be *that* hard since none of the said titles are pushing current-gen hardware.