From the dark side, publisher pressure may drive development costs even further into the stratosphere. This was the single most pervasive idea at the show. Everybody talked about it, from Sony to Microsoft to Wild Tangent to Hasbro. Wait a sec while I pat myself on the back. This is a natural.
Online distribution works better for smaller downloads.
You can even keep a winning product alive for years by pumping out new content as long as people buy it. Except for the subscription-based games like Ultima Online and Everquest, gamers pay essentially the same amount for a game whether they play 10 or 500 hours. Consoles are getting into the fray as well. When a game is inexpensive, it can become an impulse buy, and once the impulse bug has hit a few hundreds of thousands of people, word of mouth takes over. Frogger's sales doubled from Year 1 to Year 2, and nearly tripled from Year 2 to Year 3.