Tell that to CD. Mp3's have overtaken the market. Just look at portable cd players vs. mp3 players.

Renting movies and streaming on your comcast box or other device's is starting to take over renting physical media. I expect this to really take off soon since Hollywood Video has closed down and Blockbuster is staring to fall apart.

Buying movies and buying games is another story. I would still like the physical media for these 2.

Overall their is room for both to strive.

am I right?...

And then there's the most impotent Reason of them all.

Less then 50% of WII owners are online, and about only 60% of Xbox users subscribe to xbox live.

No purplish would voluntary want to lose about half of there market.

That like to have a physical copy of things, with the exception of MP3's.

like everyone else says, just sitting down on the couch or wherever and looking at your stack of games, also the cover art and the manuals are great to have. As well as collecters editions of games

Who ever that possibly think digital distribution will take over physical copy needs to get their brain checked, it will live along side it but not take over physical distribution...period.

Firstly two of his reasons contradict each other. The ability to sell disc and hard drive size. If you're selling them, 2TBs is more than enough.

Reason 5 is wrong because games aren't really 50gbs. Take out all of the video and uncompressed audio and they will be 20 at best. Devs are no going to be making 100gb games. They're going out of business left and right with the budgets for 15gb games. If you miss and a 100gb 100 million game fails to sell, you most likely go out of business or someone is definitely getting laid-off. No one is making enough to have failures on that level.

Reason 4 is wrong because of current DLC. Attach the rights to the title to an account. The drive fails or you run out of space, download it again later. On the 360 the license is attached to an account an a perticular machine. But everythibng is transferable. Also you could partition a 2TB drive for games you're playing on a 500gb section and 1.5TB of compressed data for the ones you aren't.

Reason 3 is wrong because maybe the author hasn't read, but the devs and publishers don't like the secondary market. DD would kill it. They actually want you to buy a new copy. But also companies could allow a person to turn in their license for $15 to $20 toward a new game from the same company or publisher. They could even make deals with other companies for the credits. It wouldn't matter because now they get the cash from every copy sold instead of not selling copies because of Gamestop. Between sales, retail profit, packaging, publishers and transportation the dev is lucky to make $35 per copy sold anyway. And if that dev has money to make their game they can make distribution a part of the console licensing fee and would no longer need a publisher. Even more money for them.

Reason 2 is wrong because of the things I mentioned being wrong about reason 3. Transportation is expensive. Truckdrivers make a lot of money. Retail takes a cut. Publishers, packaging, licensing the media(DVD or Blu-ray) and storage of actaully disc. Printing the disc. Buying the disc. All of the cost involved cost far more than storing on a hard drive. And unlike disc, when a digital master doesn't take, no big deal. Just load it again. Look Ma, no coasters. The author needs to look into storage space rental. Million of disc cost money to store. And they take up tons of shelf space. Which is fine for a game that sells. Not so much for one that doesn't. DD allows you to adjust storage exactly to the customers needs with little overhead.

And 1 is wrong because a hard drives aren't colassol. And they are getting smaller. In the time that Sony brings out that format(if they do), holographic will be a consumer option. And it will be offering 5TB disc and 120MB transfer rates. Most console owners will have reliable fast internet as the backbone moves to fiber. Right now more than half of console ownera have broadband and that number will be far larger in ten years. Games can download in advance and be locked until launch date. Instead of folding home you would be downloading your game during some of that time.

The author is strictly basing his arguments on the current thinking. Thank God not everyone is like that. We'd still be living in caves if they were. Somebody has to be first to do it different.

One other thing. I might as well have written a damn article too. I know some people have DL limits. I do. But the company doing the DL could pay the ISP a set fee based on the size of the DL. If you pay $50 for a game, $2 could go to the ISP for infrastructure and updating it's system to handle larger files. With all of the games downloaded they could pocket 100s of millions too. Plus there's no reason not to sell disc and do DD.

Tell me again how the multiplatform strategy was supposed to fix everything. Look at your results and compare them to Nintendo, which keeps thriving with exclusives. Your loyal fans are gone. And let’s not forget the pile of IPs you purchased only to let them rot.

The worst thing is this is down from last years numbers/expectations which was down from the previous years numbers/expectations. You think about how long “down” has been a consistent part of the communication and you realize those subscriptions are what’s holding that boat together. The price cut of gamespass is still a price raise in a string of price raises. They are trying to use players to offset the missing revenue. Now call of duty is out of gamespass, which is literally WHY they bought the company. To draw people to the subscription. They realized they missed a boatload of money and that wasn’t sustainable. Now you pay for it like you would have if they never bought the company… so why buy the company? Mind you those billions still need to be paid back. Yeah it gives you a chance to say we make the biggest FPS… but the internal conversations must be brutal at high level on topics that really matter. Like revenue. Profitability. And ROI for the shopping spree.

Is this like the 10th quarter in a row they're down 33% on hardware how is that even mathematically possible. You would think their mediocrity would Plateau