Within an interview with Gamesindustry.biz, Peter Molyneux, maker of Fable, hinted that Xbox owners could soon see full game downloads coming to Xbox Live.

During the interview, he said “I think it would be a great thing for this studio to work on. I can’t say anything else of it – I would be killed to death”.

At the moment, you can download some games from Xbox Live and the Playstation Network, however, the games available are limited to older titles and ones that take up less hard drive space.

Although some gamers may think that the idea of not having to leave your home to get your games is like a dream, the reality of the whole thing will bring them back down to Earth.
At the moment, if you were able to download a full game onto your hard drive, it would drain around 6GB of space and take a long tiresome wait time to download.

Even though these problems could be worked around, considering the Xbox 360 Elite has a 120GB hard drive, and the ability to download the games overnight, there are still many problems that would beed to be considered.

Firstly, the second hand market would go down, as there would be no second hand games, the prices would not go down.
Also, because the games would take around 6GB of space each, the hard drive space would be drained quickly, with a 120GB hard drive only taking around 20 games with a rather large price tag of £100, many people will not like to dish out their dosh.
This will all lead to many people deleting their games, they won’t want to pay for a new hard drive just to play a new game, and because of that, many people will become more choosy when it comes to buying a game.

Plus, the idea would not work for arcade systems which have no hard drive, you would have to buy one seperatly, or Microsoft would have to start including one, which would push prices up.

Although there are several downsides, there is one upside. Because they are downloadable, the prices may go down as there would be no cost for packaging of the game.

Overall, I find it rather pointless. The only major advantage is that you don’t have to leave your home, but if you order online, you don’t have to do that anyway.

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