XBOX 720: possible digital download mass service.

Sat Jan 28 20:01:23 UTC 2012

I've seen this discussion show up in a number of venues lately. I'm
not at all surprised about the trend as I've been using Steam for a
few years now. I expect they will take a similar path and continue to
sell physical medium with keys to tie the game to an account, and do
staged downloads using encrypted data which is unlocked at release
time. The biggest content for games is really art assets, and much of
that work is done months ahead of release and unlikely to change,
while fine tuning and game logic (binaries) are small enough that
staging downloads in tiers should be easy. There is also the system
Blizzard is using for World of Warcraft where the game can stream
content down while playing. Most of these publishers/developers
already have pretty good grasps on what capabilities are at their
disposal thanks to the DLC model they have now, they will just be
going an order of magnitude larger on the downloads. I wonder how many
will also attempt to leverage P2P models as well to assist CDNs,
cheaper for them and maybe even a revenue generator for ISPs charging
for transfer overages.