There's tons of online points card services already, so that could be, and is being phased out pretty fast actually.

And for physical games, with every new generation of children, they care less about having a physical copy. So your business will only last as long as you live ;), or unless your preference changes over time :P. I know Steam has stolen my heart, I used to love having a hard copy, but I've since stopped caring about it for the most part. Because while it's nice to have a hard copy, over time that can start to take up a lot of space, plus it's not very portable.

With Steam, all your games are with you, wherever you go, so long as you have an internet connection! You can scroll through all your games, and re-download them when you want to. It's like your own digital library of games, it's awesome.

however i dont think it should be a matter of if its the future or when its the future, but rather if WE the consumers WANT it to be the future, my thoughts are that digital distribution is NOT to make life easier for us, but to make developers and companies such as sony/ms/nitendo MORE MONEY! personally if digital distribution became the ONLY way to get my games i would quit buying them, and if it did it would really be the worst thing ever for us as gamers! as a consumer i like CHOICE, i wanna choose where i purchase a product! so i can get the best deal, if there was only one shop to buy food why would they do deals or discount anything? there would be no point! its the same with games! if you could only buy a sony exclusive from sony then where is the competition that drives the sales and discounts that we see today? also the preowned market would just dissapear! i know thats good for devs but its not good for US! in my mind we need to send SONY a huge message right now! by boycotting the pspgo!.....

@snaz27: You must never have downloaded Steam then. Because even though they have been the only real successful digital distribution platform, they aren't greedy like you say. The prices are quite good, much better than in stores. And they often do awesome sales and weekend sales, bring games down to $10, sometimes even $5 for a while.

Now, mind explaining what about digital distribution doesn't make life easier for us, and only for the developers? Because, having your own library of all the games you own, being able to download them at any time, from anywhere so long as you have an ok internet connection, seems like a much better option for consumers then lugging around boxes of plastic cases with disc's inside them, that get scratched and degrade over time. And not having to deal with game store workers, many of whom will try devious things to scam people of their money without them knowing.

Plus Steam offers better protection from keeping kids from playing the games their not legally supposed to be playing. Since it requires a credit card to buy the game.

Digital distribution is the inevitable future. The only thing in it's way is broadband speeds and access in many countries. But those get better over time also, so it's just a matter of time ;).

And hey, maybe in the future someone can create SD card's that have these special screens built into the front of them that were recently invented. The screens can change image, and then stay that way without any electricity afterward's. So you could have a game downloaded into that SD card, and then a box art would be displayed on the screen and kept that way until you decide to change it :P.

It's hard to let go of having physical products, because that's what we all grew up with, it's embedded in out hearts and minds. But you'll slowly warn to the digital distribution way over time.

Exactly, that's why we need a balance but Sony seems to be endorsing the "backwards" step with the PSP Go! as they said they want to push smaller games.

A game that needs large capacity disks is usually full of FMV movie sequences. I can happily do without those types of games.

We need to stop thinking that large storage capacity equates to bigger and better games. For example - the universe could probably be coded in just 2 kilobytes. :)

Blue-ray games hardly ever take up the whole disc. And for the very few that do, it's because of cinematics, not the actual game files.

Plus, of course you can say that right now, because internet speeds are crap for the majority of the world. But even if you have only a 3mbps connection, it would only take you roughly 22 hours. That's not the bad. And remember were talking about the future here, internet speeds get faster over time, so it's really not the big deal your think it is.

I live in BC Canada, and have a 15mbps cable connection for $43 a month. I can download 30GB in 4 hours & 48 minutes. So it's perfectly fine for me. In some European countries and Japan, it's cheap to get a 100mbps connection, which would allow you to download 30GB in under 40 minutes lol.

So as internet connectivity becomes good for more people, digital distribution becomes more prominent.

The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.

Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.

15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.

Let me be clear. This is sarcasm