Caveat: this is a purely speculative post.
Phew, with that done, I'd like to propose that digital distribution is the next massive innovation to hit the computer games industry and, if the leaders of the business think it's going to take off in the next few years, we should be in for quite an exciting ride.
A couple of weeks ago, Sony's Ken Kutaragi announced that (some of) the online services on their next generation PS3 console will be free. In the same breath, he also suggested that consumers will be perfectly happy with purchasing their products via secure online portals - with no need for pesky packaging - within the next one to two years.
I've proposed in the past that this may herald a new and valuable outlet for independent game developers. What stands in their way, however, are the tools to create compatible software for each system.
The announcement that the price of PS2 development tools have been slashed by 1/3, making the resources used to create the current generation console's products more accessible to non-studio developers, has therefore become - suddenly - rather more exciting.
Primarily, it's great news for the potential library of products available on Sony's PS3: if the console is, in fact, backwards compatible, creations made using the PS2 kits can be distributed via the next generation's "online" services. This potentially means more innovation, and therefore more elements to add to the rapidly-expanding Game Innovation Database!
We're still yet to hear from Nintendo and Microsoft on their plans for independent game support (though there's been speculation), but conceivably each of the big three hardware manufacturers could provide the portals through which new and exciting products are released. Certainly Microsoft's Xbox360 -with its accessible programming language and its existing backwards compatibility - could support independent products if it similarly dropped the price of first-generation dev tools?
Am I just being idealistic here?
