Sony Putting the Kibosh on Downloading Full PS3 Games

[DCSholtis]

http://www.gamesabyss.com/news/1186-...full-ps3-games

In a recent interview with IGN, Sony's senior vice president in charge of the PlayStation Network, Peter Dille, had some bad news for gamers who prefer their titles via digital download rather than physical disc media. According to Dille, the company is all but finished offering full games like Burnout Paradise for download, mainly due to broadband restrictions and the amount of size such games take up on owners' hard drives.
"We have an advantage with PlayStation 3 from an optical media perspective because a Blu-ray disc contains 50 gigs," said Dille."Maybe this point will come at some time, but today to download 50 gigs of data before you play a game, you could probably go buy a car, bring it home, put your family into it, drive to the store by and bring the game home by the time you [could download it]. I think we're on the forefront of digital distribution.

"We're working very hard to evangelize it," he continued. "I think we've got a hardware platform that continues to grow with people's appetite in digital distribution. And we've got multiple units with hard-drive sizes up to 50 gigs. We're also working very hard to make sure we do this thoughtfully so that retail has a part to participate in the ecosystem with us. But, the notion of getting all your games digitally, I just don't see it happening. There's games you're going to get at the store, there's games you're going to get on PlayStation Network and there's some you'll get in both places, and then there's also opportunity to enhance the micro-transactions and add-on content, of course, but getting God of War III digitally? That's just not something you'll be seeing anytime soon."
So it seems that the all-digital future of gaming which company execs seem to salivate over might be a little further out than originally expected. The suits are coming to the realization that mass market broadband penetration isn't quite where it needs to be, and the relative size of games in relation to hard drive space is just too far out of whack to work for this generation of consoles. While we're still inevitably headed in that direction, it's still easily a long way off.