Still, the benefits seem clear. When a patch arrives for your favorite game, it's a short download and you're back up and running. For the indie game developer, making your game available online is a relatively hassle-free option. The top-down system that has been in place for decades -- the traditional brick-and-mortar approach to selling -- demands such a gargantuan expenditure of additional resources that it hardly seems worth the trouble. The big corporations have deep relationships in place that they have to keep supporting at the risk of falling behind their competitors, but the smaller dev studios can operate much leaner, and their profit margins are much broader. Success for them is much less fraught with danger, and part of the reason for that is the increasing ubiquity of high-speed access to the Internet, something that wasn't always the case in earlier years.

Is there a greater downside to digital downloads? Are we ready to say goodbye forever to being forced to leave our comfortable homes to go to the nearest retail outlet for a new game? Doesn't it mean more money for the developer of the game if there's no middleman?

One of the biggest differentiators between huge publishers and indie dev houses is the budget they can use to promote their games. For companies like Electronic Arts, a large advertising budget could conceivably be used as a blunt weapon, offering download services massive kickbacks for exclusive deals, crowding out banner ads for other companies' games, etc. The only thing keeping these services from biting would be their own consciences. But money is a powerful force, and hosting a download service can really rack up the fees.

So instead of the rosy future wherein all games are seen as equal because they're all listed on the same new games page, we see the same tactics taking place from the big boys of the industry. Turns out that the Internet isn't really a democracy after all.

We'd like to think that the indie game has as much of a chance to succeed as the corporate game does, but most game players have a limited budget for entertainment, and unfortunately, he who shouts the loudest usually gets his message heard the best, regardless of the actual merit of its content.

Still, if you're looking for a particular title, you get to bypass all that and vote with your dollars. Nothing's going to happen to digital downloads; they won't go away quickly, and it's likely they're here to stay. Valve Software's Steam service has been the most successful such service by simply being the first to make it really work. And now that LucasArts is re-releasing its older titles -- crossing fingers here for Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango -- athe badly aging and obsolete floppies you've been carefully hoarding in hermetic vessels can finally be destroyed. Let's face it: sooner or later, all media will become available online, it's inevitable. But we should be careful in how we implement the means to distribute it all; future generations will thank us.