Sean Ryan posts on his experiences using the Xbox Live Marketplace to download a game demo in next to no time:

He also makes a good point about consoles playing catch-up since PC games have long been advocates of downloadable demos. Unreal Tournament 2007 will no doubt be the big downloadable demo for PCs in 2007. With the exception of the Xbox 306 (which is just a loud PC-in-a-box, after all), consoles are isolated units with little in the way of online components. For game developers this presents challenges where the ‘gold’ code is what the users get, bugs and all. For PC games, the accepted procedure seems to encourage releasing buggy code so long as a hefty patch file is available for download on or around the launch date. Indeed, with the advent of tools like Steam, all PC games must and do go online to activate, update and sanction play.

My own recent experience of consoles, though, has been good. Just last week I discovered how well implemented game sharing is on a PSP. Playing a copy of Burnout Legends that had been shared from Tom’s PSP to mine worked almost flawlessly. Streaming the data over a wireless connection took a little bit of time but after that we were able to race each other using only one purchased copy of the game.