Should handheld gaming go download only?

If 2008 has taught us anything, it's that people like the App Store. In fact, they love it and have bought a silly amount of games on it since it launched. The PSP now has the native PSP Store and the DS is going to be getting DSi Ware games soon too, so the big question is, does the high street retail of handheld games have a future?

It seems logical that Sony and Nintendo will want to follow Apple and Nokia's successful distribution methods when the time comes to release new hardware. It saves on the cost of manufacturing the games, they can be updated if they need any bugs fixed and you don't need to go to the bother of trekking down to your local rip-off merchant of a games retailer to get the goods.

But then, some people like to maintain a proudly displayed shelf of classic games. And what about the second-hand market, isn't that the meat and potatoes of gaming retail?

What are you thinking...?

This would be good as you could easily access the games you need wquickly and probably cheaper.

But shops like GAME would go out of buisness coz no1 wud be buying them.

Also it would peobably be easier to hack so they could lose alot of profits.

i personally like having the cases and books of games instead of it just being on my memory stick. As well as this PSP games would probably take up quite a lot of space and so u would have to delete them if u wanted to have a new game. So basically you are going to be wasting your money. Kepp them in cases and the good old UMD discs please!!!!

The games would proably be cheaper for consumers and memory sticks would be cheaper for ones with more memory.

Having the cases just takes up so much space I dont like it.

i really cannot see and hopefully just downloadable games will not happen. However, super stardust for the PSP is a download only from the PSP Playstation store so i guess they are trying it out. As well as this, i think the Playstation store will get hacked in no time if games were to go download only.

Its probably a better concept then actual reality. I hope they bring it out as well as the games then everyone will be happy

Hacking would be a major issue and would have to have very good security.