The claim was asserted a bit ago that in five years time, due to an 'inevitable' fuck-up by someone, nobody would be using DD.
Kinda seems that ship has long sailed; it's a bit like saying any day now there's going to be massive fuck-up on Apple's part and everyone will stop downloading music through iTunes. Which they've been doing for ten years now. Or buying apps and games for their smartphones and tablets. Which are DD only and that's never going to change.
This is literally the first generation in which DD has been a viable business. There's too many questions about licenses and future access to content we paid for that we haven't had the chance to challenge yet. When the generation change happens, we'll see what happens. For instance, after the 360 was out for a year or two, Microsoft shut off XBL for the original Xbox. Only a few games were really affected due to DLC (Unreal Championship, Halo), but if Microsoft does that with the 360, we are out patches, DLC, multiplayer, and in games with online passes, entire portions of single player games (Catwoman, questlines from games like Rage or Kingdoms of Amalur).
The difference is really the difference between games as a product and games as a service. When a game is a product, once you buy it, it is yours. At most, you've got a small DRM check at startup that hackers will undoubtedly figure out a way past. But games as a service, when that service is turned off, the amount of things you lose and the difficulty of ever getting it back is much, much greater.
I think the PSP Go showed the DD-only releases is not viable for everybody. The fact that niche, fan games are the only ones which succeed this way says less about the cheap cost of publishing and more about the fact that niche fans are the only ones they can reliably get to purchase DD-only games. I mean, look at the DD-only full releases (not including XBLA games): Warriors Orochi 3, Corpse Party, Record of the Agarest War, ClaDun 1 and 2 - these are all games that the fans were honestly just thankful to have in any form at all.
To me, that feels exploitative. Like if you tried to release a DD-only Jak and Daxter PSP game, it wouldn't sell very well at all. It's only the fans who do anything to play these games being given only a single inferior choice, and then it being pointed at and saying, "look! DD-only works! These fans desperate for JRPGs are buying the games we aren't offering in any other way in droves!"
So yeah... predicting some kind of disaster for DD requires, I think, crafting a plausible scenario for digital distribution of media and software to vanish overnight or become unpopular with a WHOLE lot of people... that greatly outnumber the relative minority of console game owning software collectors.
Gaming has traditionally been a niche experience that has been dominated by hardcore fans who are knowledgeable in the field. The concept of hardcore gamer has changed this generation from "guy who owns Earthbound" to "bro shooter guy yelling obscenities over XBL". I feel like this change is similar to the casual market that the Wii brought on board. Yeah, it changed the focus for a while there, but eventually, that audience discovered Facebook games and Angry Birds. I think something similar will happen to the Call of Duty crowd.
I think gaming will go back to the "guy who owns Earthbound" niche market afterwards, and it will continue to return to the enthusiasts as the industry has highs and lows as it dabbles in different core markets. Those software collectors are the glue that gives the industry its history and introspection. When the top 50 games of all time lists come out, somebody is going to be sitting there and saying X-Com, and somebody reading that article is going to wonder how they can try out this wondrous game considered one of the ten best games of all time. And because of that history, we get X-Com remakes that people are looking forward to.
But that's just my opinion.
