Atari Pres: Soon Gamers "Will Never Buy a Game in a Box"

Phil Harrison is standing firm in his belief that digitally distributed titles are the wave of game consumers' future.

"There's a generation of kids being born today and probably already alive who I'm pretty confident will never buy a physical media product. They will never buy a DVD, they will never buy a CD, and they will never buy a game in a box," commented former Sony president Phil Harrison in an interview with Edge.

Harrison recently joined Atari to revive the dying brand and invigorate its online efforts to give the company direction.

"I don't see that we're going to be making huge-budget, single-player games in the future. Now, that doesn't mean that we won't have ambition to do really incredible games that have high quality, high execution, and high innovation, but they won't be one-player, narrative-driven, start-middle-end games," said Harrison earlier this year, shortly after his switch to Atari.

Will gaming go completely digital in the next 20 years? That is a long time in technology terms, yet the existence of retail products is heavily installed in society and could take just as much time to be removed.