So a few questions on this matter...

Why do people buy into the matter of Microsoft pushing this matter so much; it's not like Microsoft is spot on for everything, afterall, they chose to back hd-dvd; which if digital downloads were the future, why would they do that? It seems to me they just  can't face up when they make a mistake.

Why do people that don't seem to mind multiple discs for games seem so adamantly against Blu-ray? If Blu-ray has no place in the "coming age of digital downloads" what the heck place do multiple disc games?

What is the backup plan when your internet is down?

Do you have any idea how much of a harddrive it would take to store some people's collection? I foresee that interfering with a transition to solid state drives as well. Of course you could keep one hard drive for each, but that's an unnecessary hassle. Also, the transfer rates of disk drives will always be slower than solid state, meaning if we moved on to say some flash based storage for games we could further reduce load times, which will become even more imporant as games continue to get larger and larger.

If everything went to digital what would be the point of owning a console, wouldn't we just transfer over to running everything on servers with something like onLive at that point?

What about collector's? Wouldn't this make it all that much easier to piracy? Do you realize how many middlemen would be cut out of the profits of publsihing media? Are they just going to sit back and take that? How about the added expense of businesses to maintain enough servers to take all the hits. What happens when a publisher's servers are all down, unlikely, but possible.

Okay, I'm not going to beat this anymore. I'm not trying to argue that Blu-ray is the future or anything, just point out that digital downloads don't offer any more of a future. Honestly, I feel it is absolutely out of the question on a large scale until the internet's framework is entirely fiber optics, which is likely not to happen until the intervention of Internet 2, which I see as at least a decade away still. By that time Blu-ray will have already enjoyed a great deal of success. Personally, I look forward more to flash being the medium for delivery and will be quite upset if things move primarily to digital.

To play the devil's advocate, why do people not buy CD's anymore, and isntead keep it in data form on a Hard Drive?

People do still buy cd's, though not as much. Plus an entire cd can be compressed into roughly less than 50 mb easily, not exactly hard to find room for that. Plus most people only do this so that they can carry songs around easily with an mp3 player, digital distribution with games and movies wouldn't offer the same conveniances.