Digital Distribution, not for the next 20 years.

Digital Distribution, I love it. WiiWare, XBLA, PSN, Steam, I know I'm missing a bunch of others, etc. It seems like the wave of the future. That may be but EA thinks that digital distribution exclusivity is far off, 20+ years off. Dr Jens Uwe Intat, senior VP and general manager for European publishing in Europe at Electronic Arts cites size limits as the problem.

"I mean, we used to be below 1GB, but we're now building games that have 8, 9, 10GB - and if broadband distribution is going to allow 10GB to be distributed in half an hour, we'll have games that are 100GB. Because the graphical resolution increases,.."

"The content size of games, say Need for Speed, the size of the open world that you can use increases - so you just need more and more storage space, which is going to, again, make the pipeline a big bottleneck."

I guess I can see his point there, time from initiation to completed download may be a factor. Especially if that whole Net Neutrality thing goes down the gutter. The US doesn't even have 100% broadband access, never the rest of the world. Think of it from the other side and the point looses it's steam. Some people use Bittorrent. Some people use this to download files over 10GB. These people sometimes download files larger than 50GB, 100GB, 200GB, you name it. Sure, these same people let it cook for weeks to download but they still do it and if this turns into the majority, it might look like digital distribution will come sooner rather than later. Beside, who wants to be the loser carrying around a 500 Tera-Bit Green-Ray when we all have flying cars and food in pill form in 20 years.