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: The author of that piece is merely co-opting the current crisis in the
: industry to further his own agenda.
Agreed. The idea that retail is to blame makes no sense precisely because it's a recent problem. If retail were the problem, then this would have been an issue for decades. Switching to digital won't help. As Jim Sterling would gladly point out, despite PC gaming having since gone predominantly digital, Steam and other digital storefronts still manage to end up with their own fair share of utterly broken games. Big publishers will still feel the same pressure to release big-budget AAA games in time for the holidays, and without proper testing and QA those games could potentially still be just as broken as they would have had they come out on disc. Except with the digital copy you have absolutely no recourse. With no second-hand market, you cannot sell or trade in your game to recoup your costs, and pretty much every major digital storefront has an "all sales are final" policy. Caveat emptor, indeed.
So yeah, the author of that article is simply a digital-only evangelist and is using the current "crisis" in gaming as an excuse to further his agenda, and I'm skeptical that people like him really give a rat's ass about their own rights as a consumer. Digital is and always will be a raw deal. If console gaming ever goes all-digital, well, the industry would no longer have my support.