Alternative Distribution Channels (for games)

Greg Costikyan was part of the "Burning Down the House" rant at GDC on the problems with the game industry. He's blogged a bit about some ideas for alternative distribution, seen by many to be "the" problem with games today. Thinking a bit about the idea, I came up with something that I posted on his site, but I wanted to explore a little more thoroughly here. What spurred this was thinking about the Magazine idea that Greg talked about, which is pretty much a push mechanism that I don't think is going to last much longer. So how else can we "push" games to gamers?

Nintendo has a device called Play-Yan for the Game Boy Advance (and Nintendo DS, by virture of its backwards compatability with GBA) which allows you to download movies, music, and "garage games" to a Secure Digital card. It's been pretty popular, essentially during the GBA into a portable DVD player, sans the DVDs. But it's the downloadable mini-games that intrigued me.

What I'm seeing is a similar device that can use a wireless connection to download games automatically, based on preferences you can set. It's a pseudo-push mechanism, where games are pushed based on your preferences, but you don't have too much control over it. You can choose which games to save once you download them (so you can "keep" games you really like), and obviously these sorts of preferences would be made available (in aggregate, to protect privacy) to developers, advertisers, etc. There would have to be some sort of fee for the service, but I think that with the rising popularity of podcasting, RSS, and other similar pseudo-push techologies, perhaps this is the way to go.

There might be different business models that could be applied to this. Something like Phantom's as of yet unreleased service could be interesting, where you get most games for free, but others would carry a premium. Perhaps a Pop-Cap model where you get a limited version for free, but you could pay to download a more full-fledged version which you could save on another SD card. I'm not sure which would work best, but I think this could be an interesting way to move forward.

Given that the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP both have wireless capability built-in, as well as a way to store data on a high-capacity memory card, I think that this might become viable faster than anyone might think. DS games can access the GBA slot (if I remember correctly) so you would have to find a way to sell the DS card or PSP disc, which I think would just bring this problem back around again. Hmmmmm ... obviously there is more thinking to be done here.