I want to paint you a picture from a publisher's viewpoint.

As a publisher of games you lose tons of money using brick-and-mortar shops. This costs you a lot of money no two ways about it.

First, you need to split your profit with the retailer, right off the bat you've lost a major chunk of your profitability. Then take into account other things like pressing discs, printing manuals and packaging, the cost of the packaging materials, the cost of packing it all up in cartons for shipping to retail outlets and then actually shipping all of those games to the retailers.

Now, the games are there and consumers can buy and...wait a second, what about all those games that don't sell or are returned for various reasons? Well that's another major cash-sucking vortex. This happens in most industries that need to print product. Books, magazines, newspapers etc... If they don't sell, they go back to whomever sent them to the retailer and that's another chunk of your profitability.

This is why digital download is the way to go. The game and a PDF version of the manual can be delivered to almost anyone on the planet within a reasonable amount of time. Games are becoming larger which is going to cost more time and bandwidth but even then it's still cheaper than the overhead on shipping physical product.

As a news agency who reviews 20-40 games per month our major problem is always getting the games to the reviewers since we are spread out around the world (if you're interested in reviewing games email me, GDN needs more reviewers). Places like Steam, Archive Games, GamersGate, Metaboli and GameAgent are, from a purely logistical viewpoint, heaven. Publishers who use these services make our lives infinitely easier.

But they can make your lives infinitely easier as well. Digital delivery means that if your computer crashes, you can still get your games, download and install. This is a huge time saver compared to insert disc, install, switch disc, wash, rinse, repeat, for every game you've got. It also means that when the game is released you can have it at home while you sleep overnight or in just a matter of an hour or two depending on download speed.

OnLive is looking to run games on a wide variety of devices from an inexpensive set-top box all the way up to Xbox 360 and PS3. Well, we don't know that it's going to happen but I can see Microsoft and Sony perhaps getting into a bidding war for OnLive if they manage to build up a following. They are taking digital delivery to the next step. You're no longer even downloading the game to your computer, you're simply getting the game, which is running remotely, streamed to your platform.

OnLive is supported by Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Take-Two Interactive Software, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, THQ Inc., Epic Games, Eidos, Atari Interactive and Codemasters and the Unreal 3 Engine is OnLive Compatible... can you see the trend now?

Games will never go fully 100% digital delivery. Some people need that plastic box, that physical disc and the glossy, professionally printed manual. That will never change. But in a couple years when you head into Best Buy or any other games retailer, the gaming section might not be so large, games won't be available in mass quantity and many games might be download only and as far as I'm concerned, that's not a problem at all. If OnLive has their way, we won't even be downloading the games anymore but instead playing them remotely via their service.

The Digital Delivery Era is arriving rapidly and I, for one, welcome it with open arms and a big fat empty hard drive.