As the trains winged me north towards my ancestral Scotland, while Bloc Party provided the soundtrack to a seven-hour journey which I only make two to three times a year these days, I’d hoped that I would have had a wee bit more inspiration for my first editorial for TGR.

As the fields went speeding by, I remembered a conversation we had last week on my podcast. I should state that, when it comes to my podcasting, or my writing for that matter, I always try to let things flow as organically as possible. This can often prove to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you can find yourself taking wonderful journeys you hadn’t even considered taking, ones that lead to revelation and enlightenment. On the other hand, what you’re often left with is an incoherent mess.

On the last podcast, we’d been discussing the general movement Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo seem to be making towards hosting their own digital distribution platforms, namely Xbox Live Arcade, the PlayStation Network, and the WiiWare and DSi Shops respectively. We’ve reached a point where Microsoft are happy to sell you discounted full retail tiles like Mass Effect and Sega Rally, all from the comfort of your sofa, and where Sony are preparing the PSP for an era where boxed product will be doomed to a historical footnote.

From a business perspective, this all makes perfect sense. The mighty triumvirate will see profits comes from three sources. Firstly, when they are the only people selling games for their platform, they can dictate prices as they see fit, and that will be that. Secondly, the removal of the middle man from the equation means that there’ll be profit going into the bank accounts of our console overlords that otherwise would have gone to Amazon, GameStop, and so on. Finally, with a single distribution platform for each console, the concept of preowned games will become obsolete. Hell, we don’t even get to let our friends borrow games in a market without physical boxes on shelves; if you want to play it, you’re going to have to buy it, Mister.