Most of the people reading this right now download games on a pretty regular basis I would assume. I would also assume that the market for downloadable games is pretty good since even Nintendo has a service, so the format must be making a profit. Still, a handful of downloadable games is a far cry from all out digital distribution of AAA titles, and GameStop seems to believe that we’ve got a long way to go before it becomes a an “addressable market.”
Citing a recent GameStop study that they called “the most thorough study to date on [the capability of digital distribution],” Sterne Agee analyst Avind Bhati told IndustryGamers that only 25 percent of the population will have access to the technology for digital distribution and even then there will be major issues with distribution and storage space. Overall “Management… feels that digital growth and brick and mortar growth can co-exist” and is simply not that worried about it.
As a member of a community that is usually on the forefront of all things technological it’s easy to call BS on this as the PSPgo is all digital retail and Microsoft has just announced Games on Demand, but taking a step out of this gaming mecca we call Destructoid and looking at it from a real world perspective, it’s very true that the technology is in its infancy stages, and that the majority of the population isn’t going to be adopting it in large waves any time soon.
