Well it's most certainly not "dieing".


edit:

Oh my dear God.

there are still collectors out there.

to me, digital distribution is lifeless. if i physically drive my ass to the store and buy the game, i get excited and it feels great. When i buy stuff on steam, im like "eh, whatevs..."

Living in a country with expensive metered internet, I can tell you that physical media is infinitely preferable.

once it dies, cyber attacks are going to be a lot more common.

As long as there are a handful of people who choose to get their stuff in store, there will be people offering their content via that means of distribution. It is as easy as that.

No its not.

I'm one of those people who like to go to the actual book store. I know its just a comparison but I like owning a physical copy.

I say no for a simple reason....

Vinyl records.

When CDs came out, they went away almost completely.

Now they realize it is a medium unto itself and that for the superior reproduction of CD/DVD, the vinyl has a quality all it's own that can't be reproduced digitally.

I don't like buying games online. Don't like Steam. Yeah, you own a copy and can re-download it whenever you want, but broadband STILL is not the standard nationwide, so there's a lot of disenfranchised game owners (never mind countries like Canada and such that barely have more than dial-up speeds regardless of connection type) with digital distribution.

I want the disc. It's mine. I can play it whenever so long as I have the game system. Don't need to worry about Internet connection or speed.

All the love affair with digital media will hit the trail once developers realize that a large market share can't use it well enough to want it. Stuff done on phones is a different animal because of the nature of how phones work (you'd not own a smart phone if you can't afford service or have no service in your area). Games (PC or console) are their own group.

The same applies with "cloud computing." Sounds nice until we start hearing of people having their proprietary work stolen or hacked or Microsoft and others find the service is class A useless for people on dialup. Until the world is broadband, it will never take the place of on-site processing.

if physical media for games dies out i will stop buying games for good.

http://www.netindex.com/download/2,7/Canada/

I don't know about others but I love my ever-growing collection of disks.

Didn't mean to imply ALL of Canada, but you're getting that throttling thing with a cap on GB usage, right? Other nations have such questionable infrastructure that those with something other than dial-up don't get that fast a speed.

Add in that all of that is pay service, and often not that cheap. Gotta pay to play? Gonna lose customers over that.

Not everyone with a PS3 or Xbox do the online gaming bit.

Know what you mean that DRM stuff really gets out of hand at times and maybe one of the true negatives with digital media vs physical media. Steam has kind of "solved" this problem to a certain extent however it is still a big ol pain in the butt. One thing that kept me from buying Spore was the DRM stuff that I read about.