The future of retail and online games stores seems bleak at the moment due to the ever change ways of buying our games, for the PC you have services like Steam that seem very popular where you pay a subscription to play what ever games you want when you want but never actually own them, then you have Xbox live, PSN and Wii shop channel for your home consoles in which you can download games, DLC, demos and trailers. In the future i'm sure these services will grow and become even more popular meaning we will buy more downloadable games instead of buying games from stores, also other services such as OnLive our on the way and may change the way we play games using the Internet and a monthly subscription on any TV or PC, this may mean by the time the next generation of home consoles releases they may be alot different from what we have now such as a download only like the PSPGO.
There are three possibilities
Disc and download
Download only
Subscription based
The problems with disc's and download's are that they can be pirated over time but subscribution based is alot better due to you never downloading the full game which makes it less likely to be pirated. My opinion is we may see download only consoles next generation, This helps the developers and publishers save money from not producing disc's, manuals, and case's. The other thing this helps the publishers do is sell more of there games instead of losing money from people buying traded in games.
What i would like to see if consoles become download only is the ability to sell the games we download via PSN store. The way this could work is when you go to the PSN store to buy a game you receive a redeem code which you then redeem and then download and play then when you want to sell/trade the game you delete the game from your hard drive and then go on to the PSN store and list the item and redeem code on a section just for trading in games and when it sells you get a certain percentage, Sony gets a percentage and the publisher gets a percentage.
Example
Battlefield 1943 cost's £9.99 to buy new you then play and then Sell on the PSN store for £9.99 you then receive something like 25%, Sony receives 25% and the publisher receives 50%
If this could be done in some kind of way i think this would help people who like buying disc's from shops as they will be able to still sell there games to buy others and would make it cheaper then buying the disc version's as a download only service is cheaper then a disc service, which means games that are £39.99 in shops now could sell for around £25-£30. This could be done if redeem codes are used and a system that changes the code once listed on the PSN store to stop you from redownloading the game again.
As for retail stores they could also sell either PSN cards or the games using redeem codes for people who don't have there console hooked up to the Internet or for when you want to buy a game for someone else for birthdays or Christmas's
Whatever happens when the next generation comes around I'm sure downloadable content will be a huge part of how games are sold.
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