Speaking at a panel discussion in Mountain View, California last night,
Microsoft corporate VP Peter Moore prophesied the eventual death of physical game media, according to GameSpot, which
quoted Moore as 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."
We've blogged this exact point before, but it's nice to have a higher-up at Microsoft corroborate where we all know the industry is headed anyway. In a post entitled "Xbox 360 Trojan horse; retailers doomed" we wrote, "with more and more retailers moving towards the sale of used games, first- and third-party publishers are going to push the direct-to-consumer channel even harder."
Moore concedes that for now Microsoft is going to have to play nicey-nice with the retailers because they're still the predominant method of getting product into gamer homes. But their days are numbered. Heck, even Nintendo's planning to offer their entire back-catalog of games via download. Every one of those games was previously sold through the retail channel.
Given Best Buy's disastrous handling of the Xbox 360 launch, the day when we're all downloading content directly can't come soon enough.
