Is your console online?

Just as in movies or music the games press is constantly complaining that more esoteric last gen games like Okami, We Love Katamari and Psychonauts never sell – despite the critical plaudits.

Two of the primary reasons for this is the lack of marketing and the fact that many shops simply don’t stock the games, or at least not in any number.

They’re essentially left to fend for themselves by their own publishers and predictably they almost never do.

Xbox Live Arcade and other similar services such as Steam on the PC, offer an obvious solution to this problem.

Bill Gates once famously commented that Blu-ray and HD-DVD would be the last physical formats – that from then on all games, movies and music would be available simply as downloads.

This benefits games far more than any other media, given how difficult it is to find any title that’s not in the top ten or has been out for more than a year.

Which is a lot more useful than the other horrors of downloadable content, like exclusive horse armour or paying for cheats.