Atari President Says New Generation To Eschew Physical Media
In the days when the format war was in full swing between HD-DVD and Blu-ray, forums and comment threads were seeing a small portion of people saying that the whole thing was pointless because by the time either format managed to get a toehold on the market digital distribution would be taking over.
Atari president Phil Harrison has voiced a similar theory about the future of gaming and media in general. He’s come out to say that the game industry’s future audience will not be relying on physical forms of media. “There’s a generation of kids being born today and probably already alive who I’m pretty confident will never buy a physical media product. They will never buy a DVD, they will never buy a CD, and they will never buy a game in a box,” Harrison said in an interview with Edge.
He suggests that in five years over 90% of content will be downloaded. With companies always worried about piracy the big concern is whether or not they can manage to come up with some way to institute DRM controls that aren’t quite as brutal and draconian as the ones they’ve had for games like Spore.