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Microsoft Announces Xbox 360 Game Digital Distribution, Launches August
by Nick Breckon, Jun 01, 2009 12:43pm PDTMicrosoft today announced that Xbox 360 titles will soon be available to purchase and download.
"We're launching full retail games on demand [this year]," said Microsoft general manager Mark Whitten. "We'll be launching this in August with a portfolio of about 30 titles. We'll be launching new titles every week."
Mass Effect, BioShock, Assassin's Creed, Oblivion and Call of Duty 2, Civilization Revolution, DiRT and Rainbow Six 2 are all titles that were confirmed for a digital release by way of a demonstration of the on-demand interface. The interface resembles the Xbox Originals store.
"You'll see these priced just like retail," said Whitten, who did not clarify whether there are plans for new releases to launch on the service alongside disc-based versions.
Comments
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The disadvantage? Sometimes when I think about what game to play I only look at what is on the game rack. I often forget about my downloaded titles. For me my solution will probably be printing off little pictures of the stuff I have and putting them in a little picture binder. HAHAHHA. Or simpler, I could just take a picture on my iphone and put it in a specific category. Hmnn, I should do that with all my movies and table top games too...
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With many games averaging at 5-6 GB, MS will have to completely rethink their HDD SKUs if they really want digital distribution to take off. They probably will never release 360 HDDs that are as large and as cheap as PC drives, but come on; they can do a LOT better than $150 for 120 GB. I suggest the following, and these prices would leave them with PLENTY of profit, even factoring the costs of formatting, assembly and packaging:
500 GB = $180 MSRP
250 GB = $130
120 GB = $90
(these were estimated using current laptop hard drive prices)
Come on Microsoft. Your move. You must realize that there need to be huge changes to your HDD SKUs before rolling out a digital distribution service for such large games.
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1. Xbox 360 and PS3 allow for downloadable retail titles.
2. People start buying their titles online, program goes over well
3. Xbox 720 and PS4 don't feature a disc drive, all games are downloaded
4. Wal-Mart/Best Buy/et. al. no longer has games to stock shelves with.
5. Wal-Mart/Best Buy/et. al. now realize that the only things they can carry are the consoles and accessories themselves, which they make nearly no money on
6. Wal-Mart/Best Buy/et. al. drop the consoles from their stores
7. Consoles as we know them go away
It's a little on the far fetched side, I admit. it would require that the broadband infrastructure to be good enough, it's a little quick to think that the 360 and PS3 followups would really ditch the drive so soon (as opposed to the following generation after that), it assumes the hard drives would be cavernous enough to do this well enough, it assumes that the average user even wants it this way, and it assumes that the console makers wouldn't react to retailers (i.e., "fine, we'll put a disc drive in the thing").
But whereas Steam could mean "THE DEATH OF RETAIL" in an extreme sense, at least the PC's themselves would still be available. If the console makers kill off retail versions of their games, they'd be killing themselves, too.
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"Let's be clear: No one can guarantee customer security. No one's solved this. There's fraud in banks today, there's fraud on eBay and PayPal, etc.
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I can get a 1.5 TB drive for less than $140. Preposterous.
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1) Digital copies of a game ought to be cheaper than physical, not the same price
2) 360 is going to have serious hdd issues!
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Seriously, my only major complaint with consoles now has been that I have to get off my ass to load the disc into the drive.
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