You gotta read between the lines there. 70% of CONTENT sales. What are they defining as content? I buy 1 game at, say, GameStop and then buy 4 DLC addons, well technically only 20% of my purchases were at GameStop, but that doesn't mean anything since you can't get DLC at GameStop anyway (aside from GOTY editions, etc... that bundle DLC).

Also, analysts are retarded and very rarely do they get a prediction correct.

But once more and more people become blinded by the "Microsoft Points ()" currency, there will be a significant lack of purchases at GameStop and other stores like that.

Though, I can agree with you that it might not be as soon as Next Gen, but it isn't too far off. It's convenient and thats what consumers want, and people like Microsoft make money when they answer to that.

A commenter made a good point:



But many others had some good comments on the other side of the fence:


And there were plenty other good ones as well.

Well, what you'll see is a system like Steam where you can preload it and play it as soon as it launches, but for some games that just won't work very well, at least not with the current US internet infrastructure. Currently, ISPs would absolutely die under the load of most people using digital distribution for games.

Comcast limits people to something like 200 GB a month, and claim that only the small 1% of people will hit that. That could easily be used up by 5 games in the next generation (assuming next gen uses blu-ray, a double sided disk can hold 50 gb. Given the speed with which the space on a DVD was taken up, it isn't unreasonable to expect the next gen to fill up a Blu-Ray disk). There are plenty of people that buy more than 5 games in a single month.

Of course, in some countries it is even worse. Some European ISPs still charge based off of usage.

The comparison to music and text is fundamentally flawed. When it comes to text, text compresses very well and can be transmitted very easy with 0 loss in quality. Music people put up with reduced quality so that they can have mobility (MP3 players w/ crappy ear buds). Both are also relatively fixed in size. Surround sound music didn't go anywhere, as people are perfectly content with stereo. Same with text, its space requirements are relatively fixed in size. Movies are very slowly going in the digital distribution area, but mainly in streaming form where the growing size has less of an impact. Hulu has pretty crappy quality but is on demand, hence its appeal. Netflix can stream in "HD" (no idea what res they are calling HD) and actually pulls off decent quality, but again that is streaming, not downloading. People might not like it so much if they had to wait 2 hours to watch a movie.

Games are different in that they are constantly growing (and keeping pace with storage media) and can't be streamed. To have a true shift to digital distribution for games internet connections are going to need to grow faster than storage media can, which I just don't see happening within the next 10 to 15 years. Also, hard drives will need to continue to grow faster than games expand in size.

Also, a system for selling your digitally distributed games would have to come around; pre-owned games are a HUGE market. Why would I buy an old game from "games on demand" for $30 when I can easily find said title for $5 on eBay? Sure the game publishers don't make money off of pre-owned sales, but if a tiny markup were instituted on pre-owned sales (like eBay seller fees) everyone could conceivably end up happy.

Well the thing about games-on-demand is that everyone gets the game in the same condition. No more scratched disks, but you'll have to hassle with the download time and such. Game producers will gain a large profit from this because of two things: Games can't be refunded, no need to manufacture CDs and such, and even after the game is outdated people will still be buying the game "new" so they will still be making a profit.

The cost of CDs is more than offset by the cost of bandwidth. Bandwidth is far more expensive than crappy CDs and boxes that are mass produced anyway. Not the mention you will have one person downloading the same thing multiple times. I've already downloaded Left 4 Dead, CSS, TF2, and a couple of other games on steam easily a half dozen times (if not more). Digital distribution of games can definitely still be refunded, so that point is moot. Sales of games after its been out for, say, 1 year is such a minor percentage it is hardly even worth counting.

So game publishers and producers couldn't care less - it doesn't affect their bottom line in any way. Microsoft, Sony, etc.. are the ones who would make the big bucks from it.

Sooner then we thought? I was under the impression it'd be UMD-based like the original PSP

http://playstation.innovyx.net/v?xlWHJnqEHWJHTlTWnqlv

Too bad it's friggin ugly…

Ah yes, the PSPGo; brought to you by the same people who thought a $600 game console would sell well, and now they've come out with a current-gen handheld that can't even play current-gen games on the format they were originally released on. Nice

That is exactly what I was thinking when I saw they didn't even support UMD. Playstation is going to go under REAL fast...

In my opinion it wasn't the end of the world abandoning UMD when they had a program to trade your UMDs for digital versions of the games, but since they decided to ditch that, they made a pretty poor decision in terms of convincing people to buy the latest and greatest.

Indeed. They're not very bright over there at Sony... Not when it comes to making their customer's happy...

And to think they fired everyone responsible for the PS3's relative failure; nice to see some of them are still around

Right?? Hahaha

Anybody checked out the latest sales numbers for the PSPGo? They didn't even sell 30K on its release date; compare that with 140K for the PSP-3000 and 170K for the DSi, not to mention that sales of the PSPGo haven't exactly picked up from 30K since its release. Congrats Sony!

Yeah, the PSPgo was a terrible idea, esp since people already bought UMDs and don't want to have to buy the games/movies over again. That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard of. Sony is really going to go down hill real fast.

The only thing I'm displeased with Sony over, is the fact that once I was 18 I couldn't upgrade my Sub-Account to a master account so I could have access to features my dad had. Now 20, I recently made a Master account because I knew I'd end up doing so eventually. Got to recollect all my trophies that I've obtained over the years

And you can't carry any of them over? That's a huge bummer. And I agree about the PSPGo, which despite its attractive form feature I've heard almost nothing about since its release.