I've been thinking a lot lately about how physical copies of games are just being phased put, because the pro list usually ends up shorter than the one for digital downloads. I'm sure we've all gone through that in our heads at some point, so let's not dwell on that.
What I'm wondering is why do they not sell games on USB-sticks? Seriously! There are sooo many advantages to this, here's a few that I've thought about:
1) There are virtually no games these days that need to be installed. Most of the installation is just about unpacking the files and adding a couple of registry entries, and create a shortcut on the desktop. If the game was sold on a USB-stick it would be pre-installed, and the "installation" would take only a few seconds.
2) As a result, the game occupies no space on your harddrive. none. and you will never have to experience that feeling of wanting to play an old game you haven't touched for 2 years - only to realize it's no longer installed. best case scenario you have the disc and it'll only take a few minutes to install. worst case scenario it's a digital download, and will take 1-2 hours to download and install. yay.
3) The savegames are ALWAYS there, where you want them. when you want them.
4) you can bring your favourite game to a friend and play there without hazzle
5) copy protection of discs rarely work anyhow, and with most new games requiring an internet connection and registration on some account the copy-right issue is not relevant
There used to be technological problems with this - the game would simply be too expensive - but I can't see that being an issue any longer. A 16GB USB memory costs about 200kr nowadays, and that's when the store wants to make a profit of it. The actual cost of the materials and the production are a lot less.
the usb is kinda slow, but with 3.0 coming along that won't be an issue either. it's probably a bit more expensive, granted, but I'm not even sure you need 3.0... PCs nowadays have so much memory that they can load the files far in advance and store them in the RAM
But most importantly (for retailers at least) this is pretty much the only thing that would convince me to cough up those extra hundreds for a physical copy.
