People are always going to want physical copies of the media they possess. Maybe not everyone, but most likely the majority of consumers for the foreseeable future. Sure, most of the hardcore, vocal pieces of the gaming community are going to shift their eyes to the horizon from where digital distribution offers a more convenient and space-saving collection method, but they hardly amount to a large quantity of people in the larger picture.

Oz your point with the DVD 9 is valid in adding more content to a disc. But that may well sacrifice the read speed advantage that DVD maintains over the much larger Blu Ray where developers commonly use the extra space to duplicate code across the disc so as to speed up reading of data. The other alternative is mandatory installs, which with the exclusion of hard drives on arcade 360′s has been rendered impossible on 360 titles.

I know, I used it to get almost 1.5 gig of data on 2 “monster” 500 meg HDD’s . . My poor 6100 mac had a “massive” 500mg HDD, and an additional 500mg HDD (not gig younger one, just meg) and the combination of the Apple OS with it’s PowerPC processors (which basically power the 360 btw) could open, use and then zip files on the fly without a hint of it being done in the background, and this was high volume files used for multimedia, print-press etc.

So given that, something very similar could be easily done today. And you’ll find many 360 developers use similar techniques now with their games to fit the huge games they have onto one 7.6 gig DVD9 disc.

We’ve fallen into the old, “If it’s big, it must be better” syndrome yet again. When in fact, if you leave a developer and programmer together long enough, they will find many ways to make their product work even better than first thought.

It’s often the publisher that slows things down, or requires cuts or various measures to sell more goods.

It could be done easily through one of the cores and software, as the 360 does in fact have 6 multithreading paths running through its 3 cores, so giving one of those threads the sole job of doing such things on the fly isn’t quite out of the question, in todays technological era.

The truth is out there.. lol X-Files. I love X-Files!! ^_^

Movie coming out in July!

They are creating a “desire to own” by doing so, and also upping the desire to retain the item, as you’ll see very few Collectors or real Limited Edition games back in the secondhand shelves a week later or even a month later. Given the high volume of sales of these, which Publishers have cottoned on to btw, we will not see the demise of Solid Disc Sales for some time, if at all.

That said, Digital DIstribution (DD) is or will be the way of the future, but there needs to be a marrying of the two, as literally millions of jobs lay in the balance, huge economies are held in the balance and there are a significant number of global users (gamers) that do not have the access required for digital distribution to the level games would require.

We only have to look at the so-called ground breaking paper shredding e-Books. They were going to revolutionize book sale, Newspapers were going to go online and be the ‘ants=pants’ in news delivery. Neither has succeeded to the level either thought they would.

Simply for the fact that 80% of the end users can not or do not have the access, the time, or the availability to download eBook, or read full news via the net. News paper soon dropped back to partial online distribution, gave reporters access to blogging software, and made the advertizers that support the papers happy by going back to full-fledged news print.

As in all honesty, WHO clicks on the ads in Newpaper online articles, about 2% if that. Whereas in a physical form, it is in their immediate view at all times, which then prompts them to perhaps act on their thoughts. Once a web page is closed, do you give the ad you saw moments ago a second thought ?

No, didn’t think so. The BIGGEST stumbling block will be getting revenue, sufficient, to cover the sale and production of games. Until that time, DD ass a sole means of delivering games is a long way off, but a joint possibility does exist.

I have received correspondence from people who do not have internet connections and their frustrations with not being able to utilize that aspect of their service so that part especially made sense to me. I agree digital distribution is the way of the future, I just don’t think the process is fine tuned enough yet.