challenged confessions

marco:

1. Having to insert a different plastic disc for every different console game.
2. Having to drive to a store to acquire these plastic discs (or have them delivered on a truck, in a box, from a far-away warehouse).
3. Having to store the plastic discs and their giant plastic cases on a shelf somewhere.
4. Having to purchase a new game license if the plastic disc is lost or scratched, which could happen a lot since I have to keep inserting and removing it.

Steam has the right idea here: just let me pay you with a credit card and download the game onto my computer’s (or Xbox’s) hard drive, and tie it to my account so I can download and play the games I’ve purchased on any compatible hardware without having to keep and swap stupid plastic discs and sit through slow disc load times and copy-protection checks.

I agree with you Marco, but only to a point.

A huge benefit of physical discs is resale.  When I first got my 360, I bought a bunch of used older games from craigslist.  That would be impossible with the current digital delivery system.  If Steam and the Xbox Live Marketplace and other digital delivery systems instituted a transfer system of some sort this point would become moot but then they would lose money.

Speaking of XBLM, MS, Sony and Nintendo all have content delivery to varying degrees.  The PSN (Playstation Network) store is probably the best example as they’ve had several ‘full’ games released like a new Ratchet and Clank and Warhawk.  All three however have ways to deliver both older games (Xbox Originals, PSOne Classics and Virtual Console), and smaller original games (XBLA, PSN and WiiWare).

I think the problem right now is two-fold.  First, file size is an issue.  Games are getting larger and larger and the current generation of consoles didn’t plan for storing entire games (with PS3’s installations a half-exception).  In addition, downloading a game of that size on the average connection in this country is obnoxious.  These reasons are why all the original full-size games that hit the PSN are also released on disc (at least in Europe).  I fully expect the next generation of consoles to have digital content delivery planned out much better with larger hard drives and even possibly peer-to-peer delivery.  Why not put all those idle consoles to work?

The other problem is that too many people make a lot of money off the physical games.  You can be sure that electronics stores, especially EB/GameStop with their used games, would be very angry if the majority of game sales suddenly cut them out.  I won’t pretend to know how the back-room dealings go but I wouldn’t be surprised if the stores/distributors/printers/etc could pull some card to discourage it.

Moving away from consoles, and closing this up, your points pull more weight.  On the PC, I often crack even games I own legitamitly to remove the need for a disc and get rid of the lengthy copy protection check.  For example, two years ago when I played Battlefield 2 a bit, I downloaded a mini-image that was only a couple megs but when mounted on a virtual drive it allowed the game to run without the CD.  It still worked online too since the game itself wasn’t cracked.