[quote name='willardhaven']Things like this never work in the long run. Game makers realize that the quality of their products (beyond graphics and music) is sinking lower and lower, so they will do whatever it takes to trick people into buying garbage.
Eventually this decline will lead gamers to stick with .99 games on their tablet or free games on Facebook and other sites. They'll try to bring in digital distribution but the masses won't pay full price for a glorified rental.
I don't think Nintendo will try this solely because their bread and butter is the brick and mortar shopper.[/QUOTE]
I think the opposite, I think ideally every developer wants to go to this model and for this reason it will happen in the long run. PC gamers have a leg up in realizing this, as the runaway success of Steam is an example that not only will people accept that business model, they'll eat it up with a spoon if you handle things the way Valve has.
Granted, there are still the 1% of holdouts who say, "It's my game, I'm not *renting* it, wake up sheeple!", however the other 99% are going apeshit over Steam sales and the accessibility and ease of the Steam library. By and large, people aren't bitching over not being able to resell or trade games from their Steam libraries. They've exchanged ownership for convenience and value (in terms of money spent to play time per title).
It's absolutely the future of gaming, there's no going back now. Consoles will catch up to PCs sooner or later in this regard. I don't know what to say to people who reject this outright and say, "Well, I'm not getting a console if this happens." Okay, I guess you're done with gaming then? Because it's happening, the industry is freaking out over controlling content, and now that they've been shown a way that works, there's no way they're getting down like it's 1985.