What the hell is a disc?

Not at all.....Next question.

This would seriously hurt the gaming industry. How many times have you decided to purchase a game after reading the back of the box at a brick and mortar when you were young? Hell, I still do it on impulse.

It's pure free advertisement.

And what about your right to trade/rent/borrow? Gone...and that's what the industry wants...but what about us? I have a hard time believing gamers want this, especially when shady companies like EA control the DL process and how long you have to redownload games you've already purchased.

Give big business that type of power and they will screw us over with overpriced BS. You can't expect everyone to adopt Steam's way of doing business. Image what the Gamestops of the world will do if they no longer had the cash cow that is the used games market and start scoring exclusives?

Don't see why they can't co-exist and offer an alternitive to downloading.

Also some games run straight through steam with the disc anyways but you can still buy the discs if you wish, so i don't see the need to get rid of them yet , personal preference with this one.

All though the majority of PC sales are digital now.

Can you imagine buying a collectors edition which then has a code for you to download the game. Physical media will be here for a long while IMO

honestly I do prefer getting games digitally. Sure I love the fact that I have the actual game box, but when I download at an average of 4mb/s it takes me 30mins to download a fame that is 10Gb. Which means that I dont need to go grab my car, head to the store, come back, start installing. It saves me way more time, and also I save on gas :)

give it one more console gen and sadly, i think it may go the way of the DoDo!

I love collectors editions or just standard, if the box is awesome (the witcher 2 comes to mind, an amazing standard edition!)

The New console gen will start in 2012 with the Wii U in april and the NextBox coming in November 2012 most likely, PS4 is sure to follow closely behind in the following april/may slot, and for this time period of 6 or so years after, there will be a steady push towards digital with physical media still around, but by the time the PS5 drops, I think we will see an end to the game-in-a-box :(

bandwidth limits suck in ontario, so hopefully not.

Japan loveloveloves discs while Steam/PSN and other download-only stuff are almost negligible. Maybe discs are on the verge of being cut back a bit in the West but in Asia there's no sign of slowing down for a long long time.

I don't think it'll happen in our lifetimes.
For it to occur we'd need internet available all over the world. At a minimum i'd say 30 years. But even saying that it may never happen.

No. DD-Exclusive isnt anywhere near being practical yet.

1. Most people prefer having physical media rather than just a file sitting on an HDD, It makes it feel like you actually own something rather than just having a licence to use it.

2. Current platter based HDD's are far to unreliable, The average HDD has a life span of about 6-7 years. what happens after that point? the HDD craps out and hasta la vista to you're potentially thousands of $ worth of games/movies/music ect. SSD's fix these issues to some extent, but they are still far to expensive to be practical.

3. the average person in the U.S and or Canada currently has an internet connection of around 7mb/sec and even that is only a theoretical peak (not actually usable for a single file download) usually reaching 1.5mb actual DL at a given time if lucky.

Maybe in 10 years or so if/when 5TB+ SSD's start showing up for under $200 and internet connections reach a USABLE 100MB/sec then maybe DD can completely take over for physical media, til then not likely.

Edit: Forgot to add, There are still alot of people that don't even have internet connections.

Physical media ftmfw. Installing a game to your hard drive works just fine, and who can deny that euphoric feeling of leaving a midnight release with your limited edition. I detest the idea of digital download or streaming only. Just keep it as an alternative and everyone will be happy, what's so hard about that?

goodbye choice

"This game sucks. I wanna return it."
"Too bad. You can't return a digital copy. That money's in our bank account now. Sucks to be you."

Yeah, that'll go over real well.

For my console, i like to have discs.
For my pc i like to download.

And if it's not going to be discs, it's going to be something else that's tangible.