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Will 8th generation consoles reverse the optical media trend?
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Happened quite often for me before all this one owner anchoring started
I would think economies of scale would have already brought down the price of flash memory. We use it in everything nowadays, and I find them much more ubiquitous than blank DVDs. But gigabyte for gigabyte the flash memory is still a lot more expensive than optical discs. A 50 pack of dual layer DVDs can be had for $55 off of Amazon, while an 8 GB flash memory card still costs $7 at the low end.
Steam | Live
My first thought when I read the OP was... Why have media at all? With OnLive you don't even need a hard drive. Does anyone actually use this system, and purchase games? I've heard some stories about how amazing it is to be able to play Arkham Asylum on your crappy 486 or IMac or whatever, but I'm unable to even attempt playing a game due to my latency.
In my case, I'm using a crappy American cable company (Mediatti) on an AF base in Okinawa, Japan. I'm sure my latency could be -much- better if I had a fiber connection like my neighbor who lives across the street. Right now I max out at 350KB down with about a 300ms ping to US sites.
Because I live in base housing they will not allow the local internet companies to lay wire. They are offering a wireless commercial connection now, that has 6 times the bandwidth, but the installation cost is around $150 and monthly fees are around $50. I haven't found anyone who has actually purchased it so I can see what the latency and actual download speed are. If it were even 2 times better than what I have I would go in whole hog.
If I had a connection with microscopic latency I would absolutely subscribe to a system that let me play games instantly via streaming, so that I wouldn't have to use DD or a box copy and install it etc. I'm not one of those people who gets all nostalgic over a game I played way back when, and installs it for a playthrough... I usually go through a (pc) game once, and then I'm done. There are exceptions. I almost always have a PSP or DS with me where ever I go (except work), and value my collection there.
Mechwarrior Online: Dyvion
"XBLIG: It's like the video game equivalent of a candy bar." -Hatedinamerica
Zeboyd Games Development Blog
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire, Facebook : Zeboyd Games
That being said it's a lot less cumbersome to carry DS games than it is PSP games.
This is exactly what I expect the next console genration to be like. We are already being trained to have our consoles connected to the net to grab a day zero patch for every new game. Adding in a one-time online verification step to link a game to a single console would be the next step in killing the secondhand market.
Putting a paywall in place to verify a used game would also be a possibility.
Hell, I have a decent connection (25-30 mb/s download in a speedtest from Atlanta) and I would still hate it. Switch over entirely to DD, and you're not just going to be limited by your own speed, but also the speed of the service in question as everyone else does exactly what you're doing on release day.
That's easily solved by Torrents. Blizzard uses them and nobody -ever- complains about patch day for them!
Mechwarrior Online: Dyvion
"XBLIG: It's like the video game equivalent of a candy bar." -Hatedinamerica
Sony aren't about to stop supporting blu-ray. And as I mentioned before, to add to perceived value both the 360 and the PS3 advertise their media capabilities, no optical drive, no interest for a lot of people. You'd be surprised how many people expect the Wii to (natively, without fiddling) play DVDs.
PSN: SirGrinchX
Xbox Live: SirGrinch X
Congrats to you. You do realise that consoles have to sell outside of the US, right?
I'd hardly call the UK backwards, for broadband or anything really.
Virgin are in the process of rolling out 100mb, and they cover roughly 50% of the country, BT are in the process of rolling out FTTC to other areas (about 40mb). However people have a choice of package with each broadband provider.
I used to pay £25ish a month for my 50mb Virgin connection, completely unlimited and unthrottled (until I moved house, now I'm on 14mb unlimited due to availability). I pay more for unlimited because I use a lot of bandwidth. Plenty of the country are using one of the cheaper providers, such as TalkTalk. Roughly £8 a month (So that's maybe $12?) and they get 8mb broadband and a cap of between 10gb and 20gb.
For your average family who just want to browse the internet, watch a few things on BBC iPlayer and download the odd song on itunes, that's pretty much enough. I think you'd find few families would be willing to buy the next Microsoft console if they had to pay £250 for the console, £6 a month for Xbox Live and then up their broadband package for another £12 a month to cope with the new bandwidth demands.
Also you're generalising about gamers in the USA:
http://point-topic.com/content/operatorSource/profiles2/usa-broadband-overview.htm
Also speed is an issue, not just bandwidth and if this report is to believe than many parts of the USA are stuck below 4mb:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/internet-broadband-high-speed-downloads,11796.html
If that's to be believed, and taking in to account most full 360 games are roughly 8gb (and if anything that will increase in the next generation), that's a 4 and a half hour download period.
Digital Download ONLY just isn't feasible yet.
PSN: SirGrinchX
Xbox Live: SirGrinch X
Maybe. The point being that if I want to bring the PSP with me (or an iTouch/iPhone), I can stick it in my pocket and have all my games. If I want to have all of my games with me with the DS, I need a purse sized carrying case.
Zeboyd Games Development Blog
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire, Facebook : Zeboyd Games
Until the service goes down, or a line gets knocked out, or bad DNS information is populated across the network that makes your connection go around the globe before it gets back to you.
I find the size of UMDs is a benefit on the go. I'm a lot less likely to misplace one than I am a DS chip.
EDIT: I say this as I have my PSP with me with no UMD game in it but a few of my PSN purchases sitting on the memory stick.
Or the power goes out and your TV stops working, or your kid scratches your disc, or you lose your cartridge.
We can play this game all day.
Thats stupid and you know it.
It's interesting that the latter group work so universally well with consumers, while the former does not. Where Sony fucked up was not providing any means of transferring UMD purchases to the new console.
They screwed up in a couple places.
1) They couldn't/wouldn't guarantee that all new games would see a DD release.
2) They offered no incentive for current UMD/PSP owners to migrate to the new hardware.
3) Games aren't priced competitively enough for people to seriously choose the Go over the 2000/3000 where cheap UMDs are abundant.
Lines getting knocked out and wonky DNS routing are equally inane points, though. I assume people play WoW without being consumed by the dread of their Internet connection being gone for, like an hour. It's not exactly monkey's paw level terror.
Yes, I do.
My real point, and I'm going to leave it at this, is there are always issues with any entertainment system. And by putting more hoops between you and your entertainment, regardless of how smoothly those hoops are navigated under optimal conditions, will always create more possible fail-points.
However, realistically, you are still only hitting those fail-points rarely, if ever. My bandwidth is shit, and onlive looks and plays great on my TV. If I lose my connection or something happens to it, then yes, I lose my games. But that happens about as often as me losing power, so.. *shrug* I guess I'll play a board game or read a book until it gets resolved.
Whoever even said it was a terror.
It was a point. Online exclusive things are tied actually being online. In your example, ignoring the fact that it was for PC and not consoles, if the connection/servers went down/what have you, Then you could still play single player games.
With with consoles that are online exclusive, you are just out of luck until whatever caused the disconnect between you and the service is repaired. Mainstream console makers wont take a risk on that for quite some time
You are trying to undermine my valid points by elevating it to absurdity, then attacking your own elevation instead of my initial arguments.
Why are we even talking about DD and this various other crap when the initial premise was about the possibility of a return to cart based gaming with reductions in flash memory prices, increases in capacity and the possibility of its per unit OEM price between manuf.'s dropping as a million+ games come out each month requiring it.
DVD transfer rates on an Xbox 360 8x drive are ~10.6Mb a second. To get comparable transfer rate, you're looking at Class 10 SDHC cards, which are, comparatively, pretty expensive. In order to get a measurable boost, they would have to use the newer SDXC cards which have a theoretical throughput of 832Mb a second, and can come in up to 2TB of storage (though they have to stick to 64GB in order to remain compatible with SD 2.0 devices). However only a small number of these cards are available, they come in a wide range of qualities (~15mb-400mb a second, depending on the card), and they're also really expensive.
The problem with flash memory is that the specs required to have a viable replacement for optical media ends up being kind of an apples and oranges thing. SD cards are meant to be used for things like DSLR cameras as a reusable storage medium for film. To restrict them to the single-use nature of consoles is to negate most of what they are designed to do.
Your point about Internet connections and DNSes are as absurd as concerns about losing discs or getting them scratched. Without elevating anything:
was, as you put it, "stupid." You could just wait for those problem to be fixed. I don't think connection problems and DNS issues happen often enough for most people to be even slightly concerned. Valid points have been made against DD, but those two were ridiculous.
I've responded to this earlier, too. I don't think there would be any reduction in flash memory prices since SD cards are already ubiquitous. They're used in MP3 players, in cameras and camcorders, and in cell phones. The DS already uses carts, and I think it moves more games than any of the consoles. Whatever reduction to be seen has already happened, and it's still 5-10 times more expensive.
Even so there are a few comments saying DD-only is feasible, it's not. That was more my point
PSN: SirGrinchX
Xbox Live: SirGrinch X
http://www.industrygamers.com/news/gamestop-will-begin-selling-psn-dlc-at-retail/
Gamestop will weather that storm.
I write news there. It is fun.
I don't know - when I buy a 1600 point XBLM card or a $20 PSN card how much is MS/Sony getting versus GS? I always figured they just kept that stuff in there and made no money on it because they wanted me in the store looking at the used games.
1. I lose my internet access far more than I lose electricity.
2. I am actually quite worried about the time when some service I have bought a fair amount of downloadable games on goes belly up. I consider it to be inevitable.
my twitter | my youtube
Yeah.
The only problem with that is that middle 'murica doesn't have any broadband infrastructure worth talking about.
I mean, sure, game companies WILL EVENTUALLY go for straight DD, with no physical products, but Australia and America would have to go without(Unless Australia went for the fiber-optic instead of those shitty wireless boxes)
I mean, I guess that Gamestop could sell portable media, but even that's going to be eclipsed by DD.
Given the obvious fact (that you need electricity for a router to work), I'm going to guess that pretty much everyone in North America loses internet way more often than they lose electricity. I get internet interruptions once a week or every two weeks (which can be a minute long or last five hours).
If GA Power tried to pull that shit, their managers would probably be worried that their houses would be broken into at night. But for the ISP providers, it's pretty much "business as usual". This is ignoring the actual issues of speed, and just going for "is there any internet at all?"
It really does boggle my mind that "Oh no, my Internet might go down and then I wouldn't be able to play video games" would factor even infinitesimally as a consideration. The service going down seems much more real to me.
In my area, if you lose electricity, you always lose internet, almost certainly--and it's not a matter of not having electricity for your router. Power lose almost always results from a line going down due to weather or something less common, like routine work (extremely uncommon, and very short by comparison). Weather bringing down power lines bring down the cable and phone lines sharing the same posts in my area, without fail.
Add to the fact that you can get internet loss for any number of other reasons--particularly maintenance (a lot more often, probably 20 times at the least) without the power infrastructure going down...I can easily think of the last time I lost internet, but if I think of the last time I lost power, especially more than for any longer than two seconds, is a lot harder.