Friday 4 August 2006
Phil Harrison, the executive vice president of Sony Europe, has said that he would be "amazed if the PlayStation 4 has a physical disc drive", believing that by the time the PS3 successor is a reality all game content will be available via download as opposed to the current disc format.

The success of services such as Valve's Steam and Microsoft's Live Marketplace and Arcade has proved that consumers are prepared to get their games online if they're reasonably priced and easy to access.

It's also proving a profitable way of distributing game content - Activision has recently announced that its raked in a cool million dollars from its downloadable Call of Duty maps.

It's this type of success that prompted Harrison to tell US tech magazine, Wired, that business models for software supply will have to change dramatically in order to get games out to the consumers.

Earlier this year Microsoft's corporate vice president of interactive entertainment, Peter Moore, was quoted as saying "years from now, the concept of driving to the store to buy a plastic disc with data on it and driving back and popping it in the drive will be ridiculous - we'll tell our grandchildren we did that, and they'll laugh at us."

A similar sort of change is, of course, occurring in the music industry with many consumers getting hold of music through downloads. Many experts believe this will happen with movie distribution as broadband speeds become faster and downloads become quicker.