Tray and Play

Gamespot has a story on the future of gaming on Windows, and one interesting point was "Tray and Play", basically allowing a zero-installion experience for PC gaming, similar to consoles. It's being touted as pretty new, but it's not.

Back when gaming first got going on Windows 95, there were several games with a similar zero-installation feature ... I can remember Gex and a Pitfall remake as being notable examples. (I was on the support team at Microsoft through a contractor for the titles.) Zero-Installation worked as advertised, but the games that used it were cookie-cutter platformers, and enthusiasm lagged.

My take on this ... why wouldn't you use the advantages that come with having a PC to play games on, as opposed to trying to turn a $1000+ device into a $200 device? People that want to play console games will generally buy a console. I agree that PC gaming should be a much less painful experience, and mroe attractive to the mainstream gamer, but I don't know that "Tray and Play" is necessarily going to be the way to do that.