In theory I think digital distribution is a good idea. I'm pleased it's keeping the PC market alive. But I feel like the current incarnation exists through greed and developer convenience rather than actually offering something new and beneficial for me. I know I appear to be in the minority, but so far I've found the experience of buying, downloading and playing digital content to be a slow, cumbersome and frustrating experience and in the end I haven't found any benefit.

Like I say I have limited time to play games. I want to be blowing stuff up. I don't want to spend that time messing with steam or other clients which are too heavy and arrogant for their own good. They're slow, they hog resources and network traffic without my permission.. and they just get in my face. Was steam developed by norton?.. it behaves like it.

[quote name='way2lazy2care' timestamp='1305032709' post='4808935']Most games will download faster than the time it takes you to drive to the store and buy them.

[size="1"]First they came for the trade-ins,
and I didn't speak out because I had my physical disks.

Then they came for the digital the physical disks,
and I didn't speak out because I had my digital copies.

Then they came for the digital copies,
and I didn't speak out because I had my cloud service.

Then they came for my cloud
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

[color="#1C2837"] I used to have a physical copy, but I was fine with my digital copy, but when they said they'd store my digital copy for me on their server I drew the line. Who will stand with me!" and everyone will be like

[color="#1C2837"]I still prefer to buy physical games, but I do digital downloads from time to time. I don't get your argument about how cloud computing will start to seem tempting. It will never be tempting for me. The only reason it is being pushed as an alternative is so greedy corporate entities can finally have complete control over how end-users use their software.
[/quote]
Well you're assuming it's for greed. In reality it could cut costs by getting rid of the production of physical copies which become outdated before release. Also bandwidth in reality is very cheap and will continue to spiral to basically free in the future. (Though I think ISPs will hide that or purposely stop laying cable to keep supply low</paranoid>). There is a control thing, but on the other hand this means that companies won't offset prices because of piracy. This also means no wait times really between patches.

I honestly don't think people will be impressed until we see cloud exclusive games with like custom hardware or special techniques not available to consumers. Currently there's nothing really ground breaking. I mean I can download OnLive's 543 KB installer in less than a second on my work computer (that has no dedicated GPU) and jump into a game of Metro 2033 instantly. It's not impressive enough since most people can play that game on max nowadays (even my laptop can). There would be a big difference if I was booting into like an MMOFPS game with 10K players using a radically small 6.375 mbps (max bandwidth I could see while playing games just now) connection.

Kind of wish someone would set up the cloud system and put every single game (even the oldest DOS games) onto the system to play. That would impress me.

it would take 1.8 days of non-stop downloading to get a 10GB game [/quote]
I have a 10GB a month data limit & would you believe it that was more than most internet users in NZ

OK lots of ppl can download 100's GB data a month but theres a huge swath of the world that cant

I don't know what this means... It sounds like you're assuming that I'm arguing that digital distribution shouldn't exist?
I was just adding to Gorbstein's anecdotes about how painful DD can be for a percentage of it's customers, not arguing that it's the anti-christ.