Games on Demand

Today, Microsoft launched a new Xbox 360 service called Games on Demand. It lets people with Xbox Live purchase full games, previously available on disc, and download them directly to the console's hard drive. The games can be bought with points or a credit card.

What do you think of this idea? Will you be using this service at some point?

From what I've read, it can take up to three hours to download a game. That's kind of prohibitive to me.

Well, obviously, it greatly depends on your own network speed when downloading the games. Some of the games can be a few gigs in size, and if you're downloading at 50 kb/s, that's going to take awhile but if you have a nice cable connection, it shouldn't take more than an hour or so.

I haven't tried it out yet, but it seems like a good idea. There are a lot of games that I don't want to bother trying to find, and this is a great solution. One drawback: nothing to sell. You can't sell the game to someone else when you're done with it..

Yeah, these digital only formats will really put a hamper on the used game market in the future. I think that's part of the reason there's such a push for digital download only games. The big companies want a cut of the used market, which they haven't received in the past.

The three hour download figure I read was for a pretty fast connection, actually. Some games are several GB in size, so those might take a while.