Digital is fine by me. I just wish that ps3 and 360 would release the games on the store the same day retailers get them

Steam is just amazing really

Great games
Great prices
Great community
Great support
Great features

Free cloud storage
Free screenshot storage
Workshop
Greenlight
Game hubs

I've got 368 games on Steam, easily the best service I've ever used.

Its the iTunes of video games, that's what Gabe promised and he has delivered beyond exception. XBL and PSN pail in comparison.

All this from a games developer with less than 300 employees, not mega corporations like Microsoft or Sony.

Edit:
Did I mention that there is no £40 a year subscription fee!!!

It's only the "right now" reality for a small percentage of us. Many gamers around the world still rely on physical media, so hold your horses. Try to imagine other people's needs before jumping the gun with this stuff.

Digital only is nowhere close to ready for consoles right now. The main reason for that for me is pricing. The price of full retail games on PSN (I suspect XBL is the same, I never go into it on my 360 tbh) is ridiculous.

I realise the publishers set their prices and not Sony but until they start to sensibly price these things then digital only is a no go.

Steam does it right, it's a fantastic platform and service, I currently have 44 games on there and most of them have all been bought during sales apart from a a few games I pre-purchased. The prices on Steam are great also even outside of sales. Their servers are great too as I always get the max download speed for my own connection. Something I just don't get on consoles.

For me I stick to the PSN digital only games and PS+ offerings. For anything else I buy physical copies. Oh and any EA games too like Battlefield on PC, last I checked prices on Origin were stupid and I can get a better deal from like shopto.net on EA's PC games.

So long as file sizes do not exponentially increase. No one's going to want to keep several hard drives on hand just to store their games digitally. I mean Uncharted 2 is already 23 GB's. I'd hate to see the size of games in five years. If it's anywhere between 75 GB's-100 GB's, then unless hard drives (internal) reach the 5 TB mark I won't consider it.

I hate how the user agreement tells me that I have to accept the changes or forfeit the hundreds of dollars of games and cancel my account.

I love digital because there's no disk check and less loading times. I don't like that I can't resell a digital after I am done playing it. The convenience of having a bunch of games on one hard disk makes it so compelling to buy digital. There is no need to worry about discs breaking or getting stolen.

This article is preposterous, first it compares tablet based game downloads to that of consoles. Then goes on to name several computer based applications (i.e. Apple store, itunes, etc...) that are successful at existing as digital only outlets. The likes of which are irrelevant to video game consoles. The writer of this article would have you believe that "full" digital game (i.e. AAA titles) downloads dominate physical game disc sales. The realization is, this article like most other articles that herald digital only as the future, have some type of vested interest in it. This article should be a PC one, as that is what the majority of it's content focuses on. Digital distribution is not the future, it's right now, really? yeah, for PC. The advent of digital only for consoles, will inevitably be the end of video gaming. A smart gamer is not going to pay $59.99 for a game, that cost the publisher less to produce than a physical copy.