At a panel discussion in California last night, Microsoft Corporate VP, Peter Moore, announced his belief that physical game media will eventually be obsolete.
Gamespot quotes Moore with saying “Let’s be fair. Whether it’s five, 10, 15, 20 years from now, the concept of driving to the store to buy a plastic disc with data on it and driving back and popping it in the drive will be ridiculous…. We’ll tell our grandchildren that and they’ll laugh at us.”
With companies like EBGames making a decent amount of money selling used games, it would be interesting to see the market shift away from something you can hold in your hand to ties to an account “online”.
I think that while this prediction is true, the actual ability to do so might be far off. With games slowly growing in size, and the Internet bandwidth unable to timely deliver demos on the Xbox 360, I don’t see a download only console really taking off just yet.
“In the future, if your console isn’t connected, it’s no different than a laptop that doesn’t connect to the Internet,” Moore said. “It’s an inferior experience and it really is a step backwards for the industry… Offline seems primitive at this point.”