The end of game discs...?

Video game discs and other such clunky physical media will soon be a thing of the past, and online gaming is the way forward. That’s the story according to one esteemed games guru.

With the success of the iTunes App Store and download-only wonders such as Battlefield 1943 (which we unreservedly adore) it’s easy to see where industry veteran Dave Perry is coming from. “It won’t be long before 100 per cent of games are all online,” he told delegates at Brighton’s ‘Develop’ conference recently.

However Perry, whose Earthworm Jim games dazzled back in the day, is also looking beyond the current crop of downloadable goodies to a time where we won’t even own even the smallest component of the games we play. Indeed, his new venture Gaikai is just one of several ‘cloud’ services in development where users effectively stream their games and all the actual code is hosted on remote servers.

There are a couple of hurdles to overcome before we reach that particular nirvana, though. Internet connection speeds for starters – the faster the better if you’re to have any hope of replicating the high-definition experiences offered by today’s consoles and gaming PCs. Also there are the various hoops some publishers make users jump through before playing. Perry quotes his own frustrations with World of Warcraft: ”I’m twenty clicks in and, finally, I see a play button.”

Moreover, it appears that we’re just not quite ready to make this great leap forward. For instance, seven million PS3 users have signed up to the virtual world of ‘Home’ but only 25-30% have visited it more than once. Meanwhile a recent NPD report reveals that only 18% of Xbox Gold subscribers download content from Xbox LIVE regularly, and just 10% of PlayStation Network users are frequent customers of their service. Sounds kind of low, doesn’t it?

But it’s early days, and all that. In any case the disc-less future Perry describes does seem rather inevitable now, even if we take our time getting there. So how do you feel about that? Will download-only or gaming-on-demand ever make up for the visceral pride of physical ownership of a game? More to the point, what will you do with all that extra shelf space...?