Hmmm, well the other issue here is what benefits this offers the consumer. All of these "smart" people think people are dumb and will mindlessly fall into line with whatever they say.
From the perspective of the game industry, digital distribution makes sense. After all it lets them cut out all the packaging and distribution, and pocket the money spent on such things as pure profit. Not to mention allowing them to maintain much tighter control of their product and cement their "your buying a liscence" position more than ever.
In general people buying anything want to have control over that product. With digital distribution there is no guarantee that the guys you bought a game from are still going to be in operation six months down the road, never mind ten years or more. If I'm an Octogenerian in a rest home decades from now, and I decide I want to play "Fallout: New Vegas" on my antique PC which I've preserved all this time, I'm probably out of luck because 40-50 years from now there is no guarantee Valve/Steam will still be in business. No matter how much of a juggernaut a business might seem right now, times change, and even the biggest collossus of the moment can fall from a few unlucky rolls of the dice, or various business deals. Consider for example what a massive Juggernaut "Origin Systems" was at one point, they no longer exist.
I think one of the reasons why PC gaming is having trouble is because of it's focus on going digital and using the internet for everything. Today even buying a disc is meaningless since the disc might just start a digital download process anyway. "Warhammer: Dawn Of War II", "Mount ahd Blade: Warband", "Fallout: New Vegas", and "Left 4 Dead 2" all being games that use this. Consoles on the other hand allow you to have all of the game data on the disc, and while there are efforts being made to require various kinds of internet check ins, so far your ownership of those games is safe (if you have a console, and the disc, you can play your game whether it be 5 minutes from now or 50 years from now).
Arguements about conveinence are kind of funny in this case, because people head out to the store regularly. Getting a game can be a special trip just for that, or it can be done alongside other things, like getting gas for your car, or groceries, or whatever else. In many cases game stores are right in the middle of shopping centers or malls.
The rhetoric about "Lol, your kids will laugh at you going to the store for games" is kind of ridiculous since I doubt shopping will ever end. If anything I think most of those kids will grow up, wanting to put their fists through monitors after being scammed and/or losing digital property, and wish they could have some way of guaranteeing access to what they paid money for in perpetuity.
As far as the Internet goes, I agree that people (especially on internet forums or in the industry) don't realize a lot of the issues involved there. The Internet is hardly socialized and when you consider the starting price is like $15 a month (and can be a lot more for a really high quality connection or a package that does a lot of things) that amounts to $180 a year and that can be a lot of money for people that are on a budget just for a service. A lot of people that are willing to drop a one time expense of like $200-$300 for a game console that is likely to remain supported for a number of years, are not going to be willing to pay for a service like that. I think people (especially those online) tend to overestimate the penetration of the internet and how many people are not online, and that includes all kinds of people including those who want to play games.
There are a lot of people who see digital distribution as paying (an ISP) for the right to pay someone else for a product they have no control over.
Truthfully if the gaming industry wants digital distribution, one of the very first things they are going to need to do is develop their own ISP-type services and network and provide that for free as part of the package for the consoles. If people don't have to pay for internet access then there is no reason not to put the consoles online, and that will more
or less guarantee the market. Of course this is not an easy, or paticularly practical, thing to do. Once you've got that infrastructure established then the next step is going to find some way to guarantee continued access to those virtual goods even in the case of the company's demise. I've been of the opinion that a very "Cyberpunk" type system where companies are required to form "Trusts" (as in trust funds) to maintain mainframes where
this data is stored. The basic idea is that the trusts being so large that they continue to grow on their own due to interest and that increasing wealth goes towards maintaining the hardware and paying the techs who work on it.
Honestly though, in the end digital distribution is just a cash grab. A method of increasing profits by cutting out the need to produce physical goods. Unlike promises made when Digital Distribution was first being promoted, the industry has no intention of using this to lower prices, but to pocket more money. If you've ever listened to industry comments in past decades you'd notice that the cost of packaging, manual printing, renting warehouses, hiring trucks to transport stuff (or even just using UPS) and similar things were massively expensive and used to justify the high price of games. You'll notice that you pay the same thing for a digital copy that you do for a physical one in most cases, which says a lot. I also think that the change in tone in what the industry says is responsible for the prices is because they are expecting the digital distribution thing to fly "any day now" and need to have reasons established for why the price to the consumer isn't going to lower along with the cost of producing the product.
