Wada emphasizes online delivery, advises devs to shift focus

been so long since i have seen that window.

years even.

lol, no thanks. I like my games being kept on a disc/cartridge.. if only cause I don't have to wait hours for it to download... I mean, look at FFVII on PSN, lol.

People always say that they would prefer disk based content as opposed to downloadable because they do not have to wait hours to download it before they can play.

That seems like it would be more of an argument in favour of downloadable content, when you really look at it.

If I wanted to buy Burnout Paradise right now, I would have three options; to go my local store, order it from Amazon/Ebay etc, or I could buy it from the PSN/XBL stores.
If I choose to go to a local store, I'd have to get showered, dressed, get in my car and drive or walk to the store in town (well the stores are closed now, so I'd have to wait until tomorrow, but for argument's sake, let's pretend they're open). That would take, maybe an hour.
Or I could order it from a website, get it the next day with expensive delivery.
OR, I could log in to PSN/XBL and choose to buy it straight off there. It would take an hour, maybe two to download.

So which one seems like the better alternative for the future? The download speeds will increase exponentially in the next few years. But I don't see that walk into town or that postal delivery service getting any quicker.

I had been a loyal Joystiq reader for a few years now and I just recently began posting comments. Today is Thanksgiving day and even though I was not born in America, I had moved here 10 years ago at 13 years of age, I do celebrate this holiday now. I would like to thank Joystiq for being the BEST and the most informative gaming website around and I would also like to thank them for always keeping the site up to date. Thanks Joystiq for never being lazy, thank you for updating and giving us something to read every day, thank you for even now on this holiday updating ever hour as you get the news. You do something that other sites just dont do, you update this site with interesting news throughout the day and surprisingly the whole night. I love this website and it is my favorite. I never participated in any give aways nor have I won anything, how ever I just love the way you guys at Joystiq handle your business. You guys are the most lazy-free, gaming community loving group of peoplle on the internet and I THANK YOU for that. Happy thanksgiving guys and have wonderful holidays, I wish you guys the best of luck and once again I thank you for keeping me up to date with the news and for being as giving as you are.

I don't like the idea of Digital Download at all for major release games. I do like it for smaller quick games on PSN & Live Arcade. Will always prefer discs. As soon as i am forced to buy a game that i have to DL without the box or manual is when i quit supporting games.

And actually having to get up,take a shower and go somewhere to get my games gets you out of the house for a minute... give me a break, its just plain lazy not too...

I don't like the idea of Digital Download at all for major release
games. I do like it for smaller quick games on PSN & Live Arcade.
Will always prefer discs. As soon as i am forced to buy a game that i
have to DL without the box or manual is when i quit supporting games.

And actually having to get up,take a shower and go somewhere to get
my games gets you out of the house for a minute... give me a break,
its just plain lazy not too...

Yeah I'm going to say No way in hell will I ever support a server-based game.
They take your money and they give you NOTHING, It might work for some fussy MMO but for day to day gaming thats a flat out fail.

you pay a monthly fee and everything happens server side ... graphics processing, EVERYTHING ... then you just get the output essentially as live streaming interactive video.... Fundamentally how your PC works now save you only own the monitor keyboard and modem and the processing power is hundreds of miles away.

Digital distribution was bad enough they take your money, generally the same price as buying the physical media which you could easily go out and get yourself YOU SHUT IN, and give you data which you end up having to back up on physical media anyhow just to be safe because a majority of them have a one time download policy, which thankfully seems to be changing.

With the grand new design they are swooning over you give them money and they give you NOTHING.... "Any kind of terminal becomes a platform" is exactly what it sounds like your buying server time at that point. Yeah you don't need a high end computer because they have high end servers crunching and rendering for you then streaming the images back to you ..... but don't think they aren't going to hike up their fees because "well we are running all these high end servers now" Plus you don't get your copy of the game, plus ISPs are getting greedy and want to start charging for every kb of your bandwidth.

So in this wonderful future your game system only costs you $75-80 but your required to be online ~$24-50 and you end up paying whatever monthly fee to the gaming company to play the games you want to play probably along with an activation fee for the game to access it in the first place... no thanks.

Give me good oll physical medium.... or I guess you could continue going this way putting all your eggs in one basket than acting surprised when something happens and you have zero access to any of your games.

Digital distribution will get more popular as we get more bandwidth.

And really, it's a really good way to get games. It ensures you will get a copy of the game instead of going to the store and it not being there, it will allow you to find older games (well, older digitally distributed ones) as time goes on instead of games being subject to collector's prices, and it's cheaper on companies who don't need production lines anymore.

The only thing I'd miss are the used games that save me money. That's about it.

What is killing digitial distribution is caps by the greedy ISPs. Comcast gives a 250gb limit every month for instance. It may seem generous to most, but as we download more content, more video is streamed, etc. its going to get very ugly with these ISPs and digital distribution.

@ Dreaded Fear

Why should I stop saying what's convenient and useful for me? I live in the countryside, in a small village. If I were to go and buy a game from a store, I'm going to have to drive for at least half an hour to go get it. It's not going to be on the way to anything, all of the food shops etc I need are in my village. But you didn't know that, and I probably should've explained that in my above comments. So that's just how I see it, after all this isn't Fact World it's the comments section for people to give their personal opinions.

As for the effects on retailers, I don't think they'll go out of business. Given the chance, and if it were convenient, I'd always choose physical media (except for my PSP) and I'm sure many other people want that too, so the shops will probably survive. But they won't be as successful as they are now.

ISPs are the problem. As long as they cap bandwidth (40gb where i live - yes its a joke) this willl be impossible. I see this as another option, the more the merrier (see burnout).

THis would be great for those who live in countries where games are extremely expensive.

Did anyone notice this article doesn't talk about digital distribution but instead is referencing how everything will be "server based" and nothing but the controller will be physical? That's not digital distro. As crabbattle said, ISP's are the problem and I don't see this type of thing picking up until latency is almost a non-issue. Download caps are crap as well and if the market ever turned solely to any type of online-only distribution it would ruin it for many gamers, especially if all ISP's decided to start capping bandwidth.
I'd gladly wait two days after ordering a game on amazon, but hey if you preorder a game on amazon you get release date delivery and usually it's free of charge shipping anyway.

Also, this isn't a slight against digital distribution or what the article is talking about, they have their place and they have both proven to be successful (on varying scales, of course). I just hope we don't see the decline of actual disc-based games over the next decade.

It's strange that Square Enix would have this position considering how much they are dragging their feet at putting their content (PS1/PSP) on the PlayStation Store.

I still prefer to own the Disk of the game so then I own it as opposed to having a copy somewhere in cyber space that doesn't really exist.