In the begining, the digital distribution realm of PC gaming was a scary, disjointed, and often frusturating place.  I recall my initial experiences, primarily with Half-life 2 on Steam back in 2004, and the prospects were certainly not pretty.  Issues logging in, broken downloads, and an auto-patching system that was ify at best stand out most from that era.  The potential was certainly visible, but the software to make it happen just wasn't there yet, even if the server infrastructure may have been.

Fast forward to 2010 and the PC download landscape has matured by leaps and bounds.  The once floundering and often ridiculed Steam has grown to become the major player in the industry after a number of client software updates and some really, really good business decisions.  Though Valve's solution is undoubtedly the dominating force in the industry, other secondary players have begun establishing themselves too.  Direct2Drive immediately comes to mind, possessing a decent infrastructure and an "in it to win it" attitude.  Impulse and GamersGate are two other similar competing services that spring to mind.  Gog.com is dedicated to DRM-free versions of classic PC games, updated to play on todays hardware and operating systems.  Even Gametap has expanded from a collection of classic arcade and console hits to a "day and date" destination for new PC releases.

The market for PC game downloads is hot, the competition is fierce, and the landscape is reaching a point where only the strongest players will survive.  Why is it then that while every other service has enhanced itself in some respect, Microsofts solution, an On-Demand extension of the much criticized Games For Windows Live (GFWL) service, continues to flounder and has actually gotten worse over time?

Whether you want to call it software as a service like Microsoft started doing nearly 10 years ago, or cloud computing as all the super cool tech players refer to it now, the end result is essentially the same.  Distribution of content (including music, movies, games, and even books) is moving at a rapid pace from the physical realm to the digital one.  Numbered are the days where we will go to actual stores to purchase "hard copies" of the media that we acquire.  Instead, an internet connection will effectively be the primary (if not sole) delivery method for which new media is located, purchased and obtained.

As for contemporary examples, iTunes has showed that consumers are more than willing to embrace a business model where they don't own physical media.  If anything, consistently declining CD sales and the sheer number of failed proceeding formats (Minidisk, SACD, DVD-Audio, et al.) is proof positive of that.  In the movie industry, the Blockbusters and Movie Galleries of the world are giving way to much more accessible alternatives, particularly On Demand options from Pay TV providers, online distributors like NetFlix, and even game consoles.  Speaking of the gaming industry, services like Steam and Direct2Drive are continuing to experience exponential growth, while retail sales have began shrinking a bit.  This is particularly evident in the PC market where the presence of titles in your typical Gamestop store ranges from extremely slim to absolutely nil.

So the utopia of digital distribution that content providers have been touting is finally starting to come to fruition.  For years we've been told that this delivery system holds so many more benefits than traditional brick-and-mortar models where physical media is exchanged.  For providers, it gives them greater control over their products, particularly the distribution aspects falling more in line with the licensing of content that commercial games, movies, and music are subjected to.  In fact, digital distribution is the content delivery embodiment of the classic licensing model that says buyers really don't own anything but permitted access.

With consumers begining to jump on the bandwagon and critical markets once dominated by retail sales of physical copies starting to switch over as well, what are the benefits to the consumer?  Other than the lack of requiring said media to be physically "in-hand" when accessing, not much.  Quite honestly, buyer perks really should be more than this and consumers should start demanding those benefits before their omission is assumed rather than just overlooked.