Full Game Downloads Via Xbox Live?

In an interview with Gamesindustry.biz, Peter Molyneux, maker of the Fable games, hinted that Xbox 360 owners could soon see full game downloads coming to Xbox Live.

In the interview, Peter said: “I think it would be a great thing for this studio to work on. I can’t say anything else of it – I would be killed to death”.

Currently, you can download games from the Xbox Live Marketplace and the PlayStation Network, however, the games available are limited to older and arcade games that will take up less space on the hard drive.

Although some people may think that this idea is brilliant, the reality will being them out of the clouds.
At the moment, if you were able to download a full game onto your hard drive, it would drain around 6GB of space and take a long tiresome wait time to download.

Even though these problems could be worked around, considering the Elite Xbox has a 120GB hard drive, there are still problems that would need to be considered.

Firstly, the second hand market would vanish, as there would be no second hand games, the prices of new games would not go down.
Also, because the games would take up around 6GB each, the hard drives would not last long at all, people would be required to pay the rather large sum of £100 to get the 120GB hard drive, which would still only last around 20 games.
This will all lead to people deleting their older games, they won't want to buy a new hard drive just for a game, and because of this, many people will become more choosy when buying a game.

Plus, this idea would not work for the arcade systems; it would require all current owners of the console to buy a hard drive and also Microsoft to start supplying hard drives with them, which would drive up the prices.

Even though there are many downsides to full game downloads, there is one upside to the idea. Because the games are online, the prices of them may go down as there would be no need for packaging costs.

Overall, I thought the whole idea to be pretty pointless. The only major advantage is that you don't have to go into town to find they have sold out of the game.


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