I was at this session and it was very interesting, having been in similar conferences 10 years ago as the Music Industry wrestled with the same issue.

Mind you, perhaps the most interesting part of the whole session was during the Q&As when a member of the audience asked about Piracy. After all there is a VERY successful distribution model now, except that no one gets paid for it.

The reaction was to dissemble and claim that it's not an issue, yet we all know that Apple apps can be pirated up to 95%, there are no-go areas for Nintendo DS carts at retail and PC games are online for download as soon as the disks are in the shops or on legitimate paid download.

There are more fundamental technical issues to address than just fibre roll out to homes, none of the companies are really investing in tech that can stop the piracy problem. They'd rather follow the Nintendo approach of suing R4 card retailers or may be the VM Labs solution of identifying individuals and shutting them down.

All shutting the door after the horse has bolted.

Are the pirates that much brighter than the collective intelligence of the industry?

I too was at the event Tuesday and a mighty fine conference it was. There's not many I look back on in the last 18 years in the games industry and think to myself, that actually was value for money.

Aside from that, the only people who built up retail and its role in the future were those with a vested interest on the panels, most notably Gian Luzio and Dorian Bloch. The true answer is that the only part of the industry that the current model satisfies is retail and that cannot go on indefinitely. Retail take too much margin, arguably take too little risk (as is borne out by Martin DeFries on the front of last week's MCV), sell games more often and make more money on a single title through the 2nd hand market than any developer or publisher. One publisher told me that at the moment 100% of their sales are download because retail has stopped taking new titles from them. That's market economics perhaps but if retail doesn't change its tune and present a more balanced deal structure, before we reach the 'tipping point,' they could well find themselves out in the cold. Many years ago EA went direct to retail whilst everyone else went through distribution. A few years later, EA and Microprose signed exclusive distribution agreements. If, as a publisher or a developer, you believe you aren't getting a big enough slice of the pie and you believe there's a better way, you will search out new ways of improving your business. The area which has the biggest impact on your profitability is retail. If you want to increase the margin you need to increase the price that the consumer will pay. You can't do that whilst retail sits in the middle cutting each others throats on price. Publishers and developers will find other ways and digital distn may just be bricks and mortar retail death knell with regards to entertainment software. Retail also talked about what would happen to marketing without them - do you really think that consumers only found out about FIFA 10 through trade marketing then? Do you really think that if we could improve our margins by a minimum of 20% by removing retail, that we wouldn't find a better way to market to our consumers? And finally Gian Luzio, it took about 2 mins to figure out a way of overcoming the Christmas present argument. If I can do it...

We may not be there yet but we've started along the road.