The high street, it appears, is too tame for the squashbuckling Lara Croft.

According to SCi Entertainment, the video games developer behind the pneumatic Tomb Raider heroine, there are bigger adventures to be found online. Croft’s latest outing, Tomb Raider Anniversary, will be the first game to be made available to download directly to Microsoft’s Xbox console over the internet.

The attractions of downloading are clear. Gamers don’t have to waste valuable playing time leaving their sofas to buy the latest titles. That means developers and distributors don’t have to bear the cost of producing discs and shipping them. SCi reckons selling Tomb Raider Anniversary through Xbox Live Marketplace, Microsoft’s Online games store, will boost returns per unit by 20 per cent.

Making the most of its star asset is crucial for SCi. It bought Eidos, the Tomb Raider publisher, in 2005, an acquisition that has helped to boost revenues sevenfold over the past two years. Shares in SCi, which had languished at less than 100p before Croft came on board, were up 3p at 519p at noon today.

Hooking consoles to the web also opens the way for offshoot businesses. Advertisers, for instance, can feed “live” campaigns into games – a way of reaching a highly engaged audience that often has it nose just inches from the screen – and to track those campaigns' success rates.

Microsoft, meanwhile, gets a shot at emulating Apple’s success in music and turning the Live Marketplace service into the iTunes of gaming (Microsoft has a massive install base to work with – the humble PC, powered by Microsoft’s Windows operating system, is still the most popular platform for games).

The numbers so far look impressive: Microsoft's Xbox Live online gaming network has accrued more than 2.3 billion hours of online gaming – equal to more than over 260,000 years – since its launch in 2004. The platform has downloaded more than 135 million downloads since the launch of Xbox 360 in 2005.

Even so, online titles still only account for a sliver of the $30 billion-a-year games market. According to ScreenDigest, the research firm, downloads are expected to be worth about $300 million by 2010.

Prospects for future growth look healthy, but Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii consoles are both also online so expect the competition to be fierce.

Which sounds like more bad news for those struggling to sell games on the high street.

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