Services like Steam and Good Old Games are so darn convenient. I recently switched out the hard drive in my MacBook, and gave the Windows partition enough room to instal a handful of games on. (On there now: Half-Life, KOTOR, and Fallout.) Being able to download the game, in the case of Half-Life and Fallout, and install without having to locate a dumb disc, which is probably somewhere in the basement, piled under hopes and dreams, without having to worry about “please enter the serial number that’s located on page 14, paragraph two, subsection five” is tremendous. So, if that’s the direction that EA (well, at least the EA Sports part of the company) is moving, and it looks like it is, hooray for everything.
The world-famous Peter Moore said in an interview with VG247 that EA Sports is looking to do away with physical media release on the PC. That is, you’ll no longer go to Best Buy, pick up a copy of Whatever 10, and plop the disc into your computer. Nope! Presumably you’d use an EA Sports download manager, put in your credit card info, and download away. No more having to keep those damn discs spinning in the tree for, nine times out of 10, no reason at all.
EA Sports is doing this partly to cut costs, and partly as a recognition that, as the likes of the aforementioned Steam have shown, PC gamers are totally cool with forgoing a physical copy of a game. Make it downloadable, don’t wrap it in 18,000 layers of SecurROM DRM, and everyone is happy.