Alternative distribution to optical disks : SSD, cards, and download*

[eastmen]

Streaming a game a la Gaikai isn't the same experience as playing locally (plus only needs a thin client, so is a different model) and you'll be paying more than $8 a month as you need to fund the servers and internet distribution.

If you mean digital distribution, that's had its pros and cons repeated to excess. It's the future, but not yet. Hence the recent B3D poll showed unequivocally that gamers want both download and disc options.

In engineering, you'll see Ashby plots showing materials weighted against two variables.
http://www-materials.eng.cam.ac.uk/mpsite/interactive_charts/strength-density/NS6Chart.html
You'd then pick one that had the best balance, meeting minimum requirements and trying to maximise secondary requirements within budget.
We have the same thing with game distribution, dealing with several parameters.

What you do is pick one variable to argue against a choice (like speed), and then switch variable to argue another option (price) without seeing the balanced whole of all the variables. discs sit in a strong mid-range position, being cheap and capacious and fairly fast. Flash tops the speed plots but bottom outs the cost. DD rates higher than discs for cost effectiveness (assuming someone already has an internet plan) but is far worse for speed.

When you 'plot' all the parameters, you see discs occupy a very solid central position, rating very highly on the primary requirements (cost, capacity) and well on everything else. There's no parameter where discs are dire. That's why they are used and will continue to be used until technological changes in the other options shift their plot positions to make them more balanced.

I was speaking more for movies since as far as I know there isn't a console that supports 66/100 gig bluray discs right now.

But regardless we've already talked many times of the advantages and disadvantages of the different formats in this thread.


As for your last point about plotting , I disagree it has multiple points on the plot where its parameters are dire compared to other formats. 4k bluray tops out at a 128Mbit/s which is less than 18MB/s. Flash currently offers up to 80MB/s read speeds. Seek times will also be in flashes favor.

Then of course is size. a bluray drive is a massive size difference compared to other options. You can fit multiple hardrives in that space in the range of 10s of TBs of storage which are much faster .

 

[eastmen]

Yep.....and very well put, MrFox.
Alot of people do not understand what THE RAZOR BLADE BUSINESS MODEL is, and/or they don't understand that Consoles are sold and entrenched under this model.

There's very little to no margin for these $400 consoles at launch. Even the $600 PS3 had a razor thin margin.
Without this model, we as consumers would have to either pay more, or we would have to take even more inferior tech in the consoles at launch.......Think of a PS4 having Wii U Tech components inside........I shudder at the thought.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebie_marketing

Back in the ps2/xbox / dreamcast / gamecube years gamestop would make about $20-$30 per system sold.

But regardless you don't actually need physical media to let retailers get a cut. There are these great things

Retailer's love these things. You can fit a dozen or so in the space of one Ps4/xbox one case. They are worthless until activated at a register so instead of loosing a $60 game you loose a few cents of plastic.

 

[MrFox]

As for your last point about plotting , I disagree it has multiple points on the plot where its parameters are dire compared to other formats. 4k bluray tops out at a 128Mbit/s which is less than 18MB/s. Flash currently offers up to 80MB/s read speeds. Seek times will also be in flashes favor.

These points don't apply as they have little impact on the consumer experience. The PS4 progressive install has nullified the advantages of flash as a distribution media. It nullifies latency, and only add 30 seconds for the first time play.

Flash as a distribution media is like Walmart buying 10,000 Lamborghinis and charging $200 instead of $10 for shipping groceries... without any lower price choice. You don't need a Lamborghini for shipping, you need a truck with capacity, low cost, and fuel efficiency.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

As for your last point about plotting , I disagree it has multiple points on the plot where its parameters are dire compared to other formats. 4k bluray tops out at a 128Mbit/s which is less than 18MB/s. Flash currently offers up to 80MB/s read speeds. Seek times will also be in flashes favor.

The scale bottoms out at network steaming, so 12 Mbps. UHD BRD is in the middle, offering high enough BW for movie clarity and good enough to transfer to HDD for a games console.

Then of course is size. a bluray drive is a massive size difference compared to other options. You can fit multiple hardrives in that space in the range of 10s of TBs of storage which are much faster .

Yes, there's that. Any company wanting to prioritise media size over cost would find flash plots better.

 

[AzBat]

I understand the razor blade model well enough. I was going to post about the cards, but Eastmen already made a post about it which goes with my thoughts...

But regardless you don't actually need physical media to let retailers get a cut. There are these great things


Retailer's love these things. You can fit a dozen or so in the space of one Ps4/xbox one case. They are worthless until activated at a register so instead of loosing a $60 game you loose a few cents of plastic.

I would assume retailer returns for unsold products would be simpler too.

Tommy McClain

 

[MrFox]

80% of sales are retail discs, and out of the remaining 20%, only a fraction is from these prepaid cards.

The profit margin on prepaid cards is also much less than disc. Going full digital also completely removes the used games business aspect.

I would think retailers would get fucked by a forced digital model, so would 80% of current gamers. They would answer in kind, with the former not selling the product, and the latter not buying it.

EDIT: looking for data... the thing I had was just a prediction...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If gamers lost discs at retail, they'd move to DD. They wouldn't abandon their favourite pastime to do something else. Nothing keeps the neurons firing quite like a computer game, and they are exceptional value for money too.

 

[MrFox]

If gamers lost discs at retail, they'd move to DD. They wouldn't abandon their favourite pastime to do something else. Nothing keeps the neurons firing quite like a computer game, and they are exceptional value for money too.

Depends if a competitor still offers discs. History could repeat itself.

There was a real fear online DRM would happen across the board in 2013, then later full DD since the discs advantage would be gone. I think it would have destroyed the console market, but I have strong opinions.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If there's a rival offering disc, possible that'd be a major selling point of that option. But if people had the choice between, say, XB1 now with discs or PS4 without, would a lot of the PS4 owners who bought the machine because it was more powerful choose the lesser machine because it has discs? No-one can answer that with certainty. However, in a hypothetical next-gen where everyone ditches disks for DD only and retail sells codes, gamers will still buy games DD. And if high-street stores go the way of the dodo, people will switch to downloading games like they do mobiles and Steam. There'll be grumbling, but life will go on.

 

[MrFox]

Yeah okay I agree, if everyone ditches discs at the same time, but the market would shrink because it eliminates tiers. There was a research that said gamers would buy much fewer $70 games, and would take much less chances on new games with DD. If the goal with forcing DD is to get more money from the same number of gamers, that would be a failure. Lowering the price to match the lower impression of value wouldn't net them more money. Having the largest market requires having the highest number of satisfied gamers. I feel a deja vu... this discussion happened before.

It would be stupid for a competitor not to jump on the opportunity (which is what Sony did). The questions are:
1. how soon will this opportunity become too small to work? (predicted 50/50 DD/Retail mix in 2020)
2. would all competitors and studios orchestrate this together? They wouldn't if it shrinks the market.

 

[eastmen]

These points don't apply as they have little impact on the consumer experience. The PS4 progressive install has nullified the advantages of flash as a distribution media. It nullifies latency, and only add 30 seconds for the first time play.

Flash as a distribution media is like Walmart buying 10,000 Lamborghinis and charging $200 instead of $10 for shipping groceries... without any lower price choice. You don't need a Lamborghini for shipping, you need a truck with capacity, low cost, and fuel efficiency.

The PS4 only has a a progressive install because of a costly Hardrive. Optical doesn't make it possible the hardrive does. So now you have 2 expensive pieces of hardware that don't cost reduce at all. Tear downs I've seen of the ps4/xbox one would put the hardrive + bluray drive at around $60-70 . That's a huge amount of money that wont really reduce in price.

If you want to move to flash you move the cost from up front on a system to the discs. You can either take that $60-70 on each system and use it as pure profit and increase the price of a game by $3-5 (or reduce profits on it) or you can make your system more attractive by either giving that $60-70 back to a customer by a cheaper console cost , put it back into the guts of the console for a faster console.

We have two handhelds that some how manage to ship profitable games at $30-$40 on a chips.

The scale bottoms out at network steaming, so 12 Mbps. UHD BRD is in the middle, offering high enough BW for movie clarity and good enough to transfer to HDD for a games console.

Yes, there's that. Any company wanting to prioritise media size over cost would find flash plots better.

Network streaming would be a problem of course you could cache some of the game or all of it.

I understand the razor blade model well enough. I was going to post about the cards, but Eastmen already made a post about it which goes with my thoughts...



I would assume retailer returns for unsold products would be simpler too.

Tommy McClain

Yea you just throw out the plastic .

All stores love these things , they are like gold to them. Home improvement stores like Lowes / Home depot sell gift cards to resturants and grocery stores like wallgreens , pathmark , stop and shop and so on will sell them to amazon , xbox , restaurants and so on.

You could actually see an increase in the places games are avalible at if they went to DD only and offered those cards .

 

[eastmen]

Yeah okay I agree, if everyone ditches discs at the same time, but the market would shrink because it eliminates tiers. There was a research that said gamers would buy much fewer $70 games, and would take much less chances on new games with DD. If the goal with forcing DD is to get more money from the same number of gamers, that would be a failure. Lowering the price to match the lower impression of value wouldn't net them more money. Having the largest market requires having the highest number of satisfied gamers. I feel a deja vu... this discussion happened before.

It would be stupid for a competitor not to jump on the opportunity (which is what Sony did). The questions are:
1. how soon will this opportunity become too small to work? (predicted 50/50 DD/Retail mix in 2020)
2. would all competitors and studios orchestrate this together? They wouldn't if it shrinks the market.

Look at PC gaming.

Retail makes up less than 10% of sales for it. And there are still tiers , you can get your new releases at $50-60 just like Console games and then there are older games going all the way down the pipe to $1 .

I don't see why that couldn't exist on consoles and to some extent it does today. However they are still limited by needing to please gamestop and other big box sellers.

One way to please Target / Walmart and the like is to give them bigger cuts on accessories and systems and offering more game cards.

Those big box retail stores could actually carry more games / accessories / systems with a switch over to DD only. Lets break it down.

1) I talked about the size difference between a game card and a ps4/one game case. You could fit a dozen or more game cards in the space of one game case. So you can devote less room to more games and more copies of each game.

2) The system would no longer need to have an optical drive which in the case of the xbox one it takes up about a third of the space on on the ps4 almost half the space of the console. This means you can make a smaller console which again allows the store to carry more of them or a larger amount in the same space

3) They wouldn't need the expensive security they currently use on video games .

4) There is no clearance , they don't have to worry about getting stuck with copies of games they didn't sell. I was in target last week and they are trying to move ps3 games that were marked from $60 down to $5 on a end cap. With a plastic DD code they can just throw them out when they don't want to stock it anymore and wouldn't loose money since they were never activated.


So for retailers that don't really care about used games. Used game stores would of course disappear aside from those dealing in retro consoles.


For the consumer they would loose the ability to resell a used game. But I don't think that has effect the pc gaming industry which last I read was stronger than it has been since the 90s. Sure buying habits would change and people might actually wait for reviews but that may not be a bad thing.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

The PS4 only has a a progressive install because of a costly Hardrive. Optical doesn't make it possible the hardrive does.

While true, the progressive install benefits DD purchasers as much as it does disc buyers because everybody gets to play before the whole game is downloaded/installed.

 

[Lalaland]

While true, the progressive install benefits DD purchasers as much as it does disc buyers because everybody gets to play before the whole game is downloaded/installed.

Yeah having watched Richard Stanton take the guts of 24 hours to get Halo 5 downloaded (an average of ~8-10Mb/s) no matter if we ditch discs multi-GB games need a progressive install system.

MS seem to have screwed this up royally as no matter the source for the game the patch download seems to happen in parallel with the install completely killing install performance. I don't know how many forum threads I've read that advocate taking your XB1 offline to install first (w/physical media obviously) and then go back online to patch, I mean is the installer thread also doing the patch download so one is contending with the other for I/O? It boggles the mind

 

[eastmen]

While true, the progressive install benefits DD purchasers as much as it does disc buyers because everybody gets to play before the whole game is downloaded/installed.

Well steam has had the feature for years where you click the box to let it play when its ready and once in awhile I get a game I can play at 15-20% downloaded.

But regardless while it does benefit DD users the lack of competitive prices which many feel is because of retail , doesn't help DD users.
Also DD are subsidizing retail buyers since we are still paying for an optical drive.

Yeah having watched Richard Stanton take the guts of 24 hours to get Halo 5 downloaded (an average of ~8-10Mb/s) no matter if we ditch discs multi-GB games need a progressive install system.

MS seem to have screwed this up royally as no matter the source for the game the patch download seems to happen in parallel with the install completely killing install performance. I don't know how many forum threads I've read that advocate taking your XB1 offline to install first (w/physical media obviously) and then go back online to patch, I mean is the installer thread also doing the patch download so one is contending with the other for I/O? It boggles the mind

24 hours seems like something very wrong. I didn't buy halo but other games have taken me a lot less to install. Evolve , SW battle front beta , Fable all took less than 4 hours for me to install. For big games , I start to preload as soon as they offer it.

Regardless they should be able to implement an install similar to ps4 and I'm sure they are working on it. It may be something the windows 10 update brings to it

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Well steam has had the feature for years where you click the box to let it play when its ready and once in awhile I get a game I can play at 15-20% downloaded.

Whereas most PS4 games offer this feature

But regardless while it does benefit DD users the lack of competitive prices which many feel is because of retail , doesn't help DD users. Also DD are subsidizing retail buyers since we are still paying for an optical drive.

You're not subsidising retail buyers, you pay for a console with an optical drive and you get a console with an optical drive. The fact that you chose not to use the optical drive for games or movies does not mean you're subsidising the cost of other's gaming preferences.

 

[dobwal]

Once preloading becomes standard across titles, progressive install won't really matter as much for DD outside of older titles.

Its has little value for me now because if a download takes hours, the first 15-20% of content usually won't hold me over until the other 80-85% gets delivered. I am usually forced to stop until downloading has finished which I find even more disheartening than waiting until the entire game downloads to start playing. I've stop taking advantage of progressive installing because it like watching the first 10 minutes of movie and just as you really getting into it, it stops.

Plus PI isn't a real benefit for large sandbox games where everything is open to you at the beginning.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Once preloading becomes standard across titles, progressive install won't really matter as much for DD outside of older titles.

Isn't pre-load pretty much the norm these days? I'm fairly sure that every game I've preordered on PS4 has preloaded several days before release.

 

[dobwal]

Isn't pre-load pretty much the norm these days? I'm fairly sure that every game I've preordered on PS4 has preloaded several days before release.

I was just being cautious as I wasn't sure it was standard practice.

 

[eastmen]

Whereas most PS4 games offer this feature


You're not subsidising retail buyers, you pay for a console with an optical drive and you get a console with an optical drive. The fact that you chose not to use the optical drive for games or movies does not mean you're subsidising the cost of other's gaming preferences.

There is no other option , last time we got something progressive in terms of how these things happen sites like neogaf through a hissy fit.

I'd love to be able to buy an xbox one without a bluray drive , give me a smaller system or better yet a smaller system with a 3.5 inch hardrive instead of a 2.5.

Give me a wii u without the optical drive , you'd cut out 2/3rds of the console that way.