A lot of announcements took place in this week. The Electronic Entertainment Expo was held in Los Angeles. Microsoft and Sony talked in more detail about their coming generation of home entertainment hardware having put their focus on quite different topics: Microsoft is all about television while Sony puts their effort in the gaming field.

A big controversy is also Microsoft’s decision to restrict the reselling of used games and the necessity of having to be connected to the internet for periodic checks whether the user is actually allowed to play the game that is currently running on the console. The console is going to check with Microsoft’s servers every 24 hours. When connected with a “secondary console”, which could be a friend’s Xbox One where you are signed in with your account as well, Microsoft even checks every hour. A stable internet connection soon becomes as essential as a stable power supply.

Sony on the other side is taking all the praise for being open for not restricting games to certain geographical regions and allowing the reselling and lending of purchased games in any way the user would like to. They advertise that you can play your games without internet connection.

I am not going to judge them. The reality is that content is more and more purchased in digital form. Games are faster and more convenient to get by just clicking the purchase button in the online shop, directly installing it onto the console. In some cases the prices are even cheaper, so there is a big incentive for gamers to go with the cheaper digital version which can even be played so much earlier after the decision to buy the game has been made.

I expect the downloading business to become bigger and bigger and physical media will recede. Apple for instance is following this trend since a couple of years now, none of their products being equipped with a drive for discs anymore. In the end the problems about reselling or lending our purchases to friends will become obsolete. Maybe all of our content will only be available from services in the cloud. Streamed to the boxes in our living rooms. Strictly bound to our personal digital IDs in this new digital world.