Gamasutra recently had the chance to sit down with John Hight, Director of Product Development for First Party Digital Games. Loosely translated, that means he's the guy to talk to about the Playstation Network and digital distribution. The entire interview is great and well worth a read, but one excerpt really stood out for me. I've been wondering for a while what the shift towards digital distribution of traditionally retail titles would mean to the industry as a whole, and what the actual plans from the big three were regarding this. John provides some really fascinating insight;

Gamasutra: What do you see as the future of retail versus download titles? A lot more download stuff is coming, but a lot of people seem a bit cagey about going against retail. What do you think?

John Hight: Well, people are still very comfortable going to a store and buying a game. We experimented with that with Warhawk, when we released both, and I think we had a lot of success with it. To make our retail partners happy, we gave them a value-add. They had a headset that came along with the game. And we sold more at retail than we did on download.

I think what's cool about the download space is that we can release games that would just be noise for retailers. They'll take lower-cost jewel case games aimed at children on the PC side, but those aren't the games we typically do. We have higher quality games.

There's no mechanism to get a $10 game to you right now other than online, but the neat thing about it is that we can drive people back to retail with games like Warhawk, because now our customers hopefully realize that when we release one of these games, we're going to back it up with continued online content. We just released an expansion on Warhawk in September, and we'll release another one in April. Each one makes the game bigger and bigger.

Check out the entire interview here.

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