[nanoseq]

If games go to download-only, I will not buy ANY of them. When you download, you can't transfer from console to console, and you don't really OWN a copy of the game, there is no physical game disk.

Not to mention you can't resell the game, something the publishers are trying very hard to make a reality for all consumers. Maybe if they didn't overcharge for games (and likewise didn't make Hollywood-style multi-million dollar games), the used game market wouldn't be so massive right now. Not to mention the economy... at least in some countries such as the USA.

Streaming games...? The cost and latency of downloading multi-gigabyte game data over and over again is one of the most blatant cases of "progress for the sake of progress and expanding our profit margin" that I've ever heard of. It would be cheaper and less power-hungry to manufacture a disk instead of taking all that bandwidth just to transfer games.

Streaming DOES work for games like Second Life or other online games, but that's different. The game is usually free and the data works better as streamed content because it is dynamic and may be always changing.

I will tell you right now, if Sega rereleased their old consoles and games again as brand new, I would pay full 1990-whatever prices for them. Totally. But no downloads!