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The poster-child for how digital distribution can change an industry is obviously online music. In only a decade, the industry which once relied on sales of
CDs and other physical media is now preparing for the possibility that 2010 will be the first year in which
more than half of all music sales consist of digital copies. That is doubly impressive because the music industry spent most of the last ten years fighting tooth and nail against the rise of digital music.
But games are not music. Music has several traits which make it very well suited for digital distribution including file size, cost per track, and the ease of demoing. One less commonly noticed trait, however, is the fact that music is a passive product. A person can listen to music while doing just about anything. This means that even the most casual listeners often build music libraries which number in the thousands or tens of thousands of tracks. This also means that users do not link their use of past music to their consumption of new music. A person who just bought a new album is unlikely to feel that they need to "finish" it before buying another one.
Games, however, require active participation. It doesn't make much sense to buy five games at once because games usually engage the player one or perhaps two at a time. They have a definitive end which requires the gamers full attention to reach. Even if games were as cheap as albums on iTunes it is doubtful that consumers would purchase more than they felt they could finish in a reasonable period of time. There are ways to counter-act this, as Steam's weekend deals have shown, but it is a major limiting factor on the sales of digital games.
