We should mention the absence of a notable publisher, namely LucasArts. In the work above, we have included only publicly traded companies. While LucasArts is clearly a big player, they are a private company. Therefore, their data is not public and we have declined to speculate on their finances.

Tomb Raider: Underworld gets a special mention at the end? That's it? For shame, for shame.

That said, the 3rd person action game genre is really looking good this holiday. Prince of Persia, Tomb Raider, Dead Space. All good stuff. Only thing more I could ask for is a God of War 3, but that will come, eventually.

Most anticipated game for me is Mirror's Edge. I take that as a good sign for EA, since I typically don't care a whit for their games.

We'll see. I'd point to StarROMs as a similar service that never gained traction. They sold DRM-free ROMs for use with MAME and had some high-profile games right out of the gate. The pricing model was odd, but still cheap and reasonable.

They folded after a couple of years.

Don't get me wrong ... I'm all in favor of standalone, untethered copies of games available from a legal source. If we're going to do distribution like this, as opposed to something like Steam or XBLA (which until recently had some oddness when you moved from one machine to another because of DRM funkiness), then I will vote for them with my dollars. I bought probably a dozen or more games from StarROMs on the same principles.

But I want to see sustained additions to the catalog over a year or more before I really believe they'll make a go of it.

If you want physical media to go away, then you complete the publisher's control over the game you purchased. Oh, wait? Did I say "game you purchased"? I meant "license you purchased".

See, the software already comes with licenses which say you purchased the medium the software is on and a license to play said software. Then there are a lot of restrictions that most people don't care about, since they can't generally be enforced when the user owns the medium.

But once software is purely ephemeral, with a network tether back to the publisher mothership, good luck exercising any sort of fair use rights, doctrine of first sale, etc. etc. All that's gone.

Moreover, and more alarmingly for me, is the idea that some parts of our videogame culture may cease to exist when publisher die. Sure, at this point it all seems like a nightmare scenario that can't possibly ever happen, but when a publisher whose works are all online-only through a service like steam dies, you don't know where or when or how those online-only works will ever be available again. Sure, you can argue that great games will always be bought by someone and republished somewhere, but what if those assets are tied up in court for years while creditors fight over the corpse? Didn't have a physical copy that ran independent of the publisher's network? So sorry. Try again in a few years, ok? And that's if the new owners feel obligated to honor the previous license sales. Why not just buy another one, ok?

Yeah, go ahead. Sell yourself to that system. I'm not in any rush, thanks.

Edit: Oh, and we're excited that Midway is doing this? If it were someone more stable like EA, ok, but Midway? Jeepers.