Phil Harrison is convinced that the game industry’s future audience will not be reliant on physical forms of media.
 
Speaking to Edge, the Atari company president said that “there’s a generation of kids being born today and probably already alive who I’m pretty confident will never buy a physical media product. They will never buy a DVD, they will never buy a CD, and they will never buy a game in a box.”

Harrison and Atari CEO David Gardner are already gearing the company towards this perceived trend. Back in September Gardner explained that the future of Atari lies in online play and distribution, with the former EA executive declaring that “within five years 90 per cent of our products will be online.”

So do you agree?

I think he has a fair point.

Link here.

http://www.edge-online.com/news/harrison-new-generation-will-never-buy-physical-media

I actually said the same thing here in the forum a week ago. I don't think it will happen with the next console generation though, I think it will happen the one after that. I think solid state flash media is the next step in the evolution of games... and then during that time period and after, the conversion to a soft-copy only.

The only problem is paying for digital distribution.

Everyone went crazy when Comcast announced a 125G/month cap (or is it 250G/mo?). Frontieer is going with 5G/month before you pay more.

The first one will not cause any problems. The second one will drive people to older technology (because there is often no other provider where Charter serves).

Mike from Morgantown

Right.  But I don't think bandwidth limitations will exist in two console generations.

Two console generation back, I played Team Fortress on a 128k ISDN connection.  It generally ran me about $700.00/mo. because of the bandwidth costs.

I think connections speeds/bandwidth limitations will rise significantly between now and then.

Yup, one day we are just going to get everything from the "cloud". It is pretty scary to think about it.

Games will never be sold in any quantity on solid state flash media.  For starters, that's basically stepping backwards to cartridges - except flash memory is even more expensive to make than cartriges were (and is overkill since it's read/write - and you don't need read/write for games - maybe some space for updates, but the console itself can hold those).  CDs/DVDs/and even BluRay are immensely cheaper to produce than flash media.

Super Black Friday deal: 8GB pen drive for $14

Normal cost for DVD replication: well under 10 cents per disc

I agree that the next round of consoles will probably not be "download media only" - but they will likely be the first generation where almost all games are available for download (we're starting down that path now - with Sony even offering some current-generation full retail titles in download form - and obviously plenty of smaller games and older games available for download on all platforms.)

I wouldn't be suprised though if one or more of the console makers offered a version of their console with no optical drive - because it will likely be unnecessary for many customers - while a premium version will include some optical drive for those who don't have a fast net connection and/or want to play their legacy physical media movies.

I disagree.  Yes, solid state is too expensive right now, but Blu-ray discs are super expensive right now as well.

Over the course of the next 10 years though, both media forms will come down drastically.  Standard speed flash memory only costs around .50 a gig to manufacturer right now, and will drastically drop as time goes on.

I would hardly call an object spinning on a mechanical wheel "progressive".  HDD and disc based media will die well before solid state will. Mechanical parts in an electronic device are almost always the first to die.

But I do agree that downloadable media is the future, and largely appearing to be the present as well.  I can't wait until it's the norm.

The idea if a download-cap is so wierd to me. Where i am from we have unlimited

YES

in 15 years probably ...

Well, my Sprint Broadband gives me a 5 gig cap... my SBC 1.5mb DSL technically is supposed to be unlimited, but always ends dropping me over and over once I start sucking a lot of bandwidth... my Charter Cable 3mb is unlimited, and virtually never drops me... between mp3/movie downloads, online multiplayer games, movie streaming, 500 emails a day, general surfing, etc, I probably use more bandwidth than the island of Jamaica, and it never charges me more than $17.50/month and never drops out.