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

[Brad Grenz]

Well I don't see a problem with an ssd device. They are rewritable. With the speeds I sugested earlier it would take seconds to reflash the device.

The flash time is the least of the problem. It's the time it takes for a paid employee to individually remove each flash device from its original packaging, scrape off the sticker, plug it into the device doing the flashing and then send it off to be remarked and repackaged. Multiplied by how ever many hundreds of thousands of returned units too expensive to simply destroy like you would with optical media. That is to say, you don't know what you're talking about and this is never going to happen.

 

[Squilliam]

Couldn't they just wholesale recycle them? Chuck them all in a big vat and extract the valuable components like the refined silicon to reuse later?

 

[Brad Grenz]

Sure, but you lose that much more of the original investment in producing them. You save whatever fraction of the price of materials, but you've still basically fabbed a semiconductor twice in that case which is certainly going to look that much worse compared to optical media. You're probably recycling materials with returned optical media, too. The idea was that these SSD devices would be immediately reusable in a way not possible with pressed optical discs. But it just doesn't add up to a cost/benefit advantage over Blu-ray.

 

[3dilettante]

Why , you can simply reflash the rom with new data if the title proves to be a dud.

Including read and write capability on the module would increase the complexity of the unit. Just how performant do we expect the cart to be? If it is on the same level as an optical drive, that game becomes a super cheap SD hard drive in a hacker's hands.

With a bluray disc you just have to scrap the discs. As a matter of fact if a title proves to be a poor seller and another title from the same publisher proves to be a hit they can reflash the poor seller roms with the new game and push them out.

After you unstock the items, send them back, repackage, recode, revalidate, then reship them, etc.
Piracy would take a major leap if game reflashing was so easy and widespread that a local wallmart employee could do it.

This would mean you can ship many more copies and transport many more copies at a reduced cost .

If expected sales volumes don't grow, it's just shipping stuff you wind up shipping back to be reflashed.
The cost of doing the same amount of business goes up.

Retail space will also free up allowing older titles to stay on store shelves longer even if they aren't as big of a seller.

They might have to, since shipping them back is expensive and throwing them out might be illegal/expensive.

Also it can cut down on piracy if you create an ultra fast ssd type of set up.

I think they'll just steal the bargain bin flash drives. The theft demand might require bigger packaging to keep theft down.
If it were read-only, they'd be useless as drives, but then we're back to the disposal and inventory problem.

Leaving $28 or so left for publisher , platform holder , developer. If you can increase the price by $5 while chipping away at the $10-15 going to marketing , shipping , box art , box costs. You can make room for what could cost as low as $1-5 for the ssd.

So somebody other than the console maker has to eat the cost of the format.
Retailers may eat it, the publishers might eat it, a higher-price means the customer might eat the price, which might drive down the attach rate and cut down the sales volume of all those possibly cheaper to ship games.

 

[AlNom]

Another nail in the "cheap SSD" coffin:

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=13697

Implication is that they're already selling SSDs cheaper than they want to. i.e. how can the price fall further so rapidly as some may desire?

 

[eastmen]

The flash time is the least of the problem. It's the time it takes for a paid employee to individually remove each flash device from its original packaging, scrape off the sticker, plug it into the device doing the flashing and then send it off to be remarked and repackaged. Multiplied by how ever many hundreds of thousands of returned units too expensive to simply destroy like you would with optical media. That is to say, you don't know what you're talking about and this is never going to happen.

Really? Really . Your telling me they can use machines to back the ssd into the cases but they can't use a machine to extract them from the packaging ?

I find this unlikely.

ncluding read and write capability on the module would increase the complexity of the unit. Just how performant do we expect the cart to be? If it is on the same level as an optical drive, that game becomes a super cheap SD hard drive in a hacker's hands.

Set up a connection that only exists on the system. don't liscense out the connection and you should be fine. Also if you can create a high speed device it would be even harder for cheap knock offs to come onto the market.

fter you unstock the items, send them back, repackage, recode, revalidate, then reship them, etc.
Piracy would take a major leap if game reflashing was so easy and widespread that a local wallmart employee could do it.

With what equipment ?

If you look at the psp and ds , its not the formats that are being hacked and used , its other components like the psp memory stick and design flaws.

Look at the DC , xbox , ps2 , xbox 360. Its as simple ripping a disc , uploading it for download. Downloading and putting it on a dvd or in the dc case a cd. Bluray blanks are becoming cheaper. I can get them for 5 bucks now. The only thing protecting it is software and at some point that will be hacked. Next gen they wont even get the buffer of expensive media with bluray discs.

If expected sales volumes don't grow, it's just shipping stuff you wind up shipping back to be reflashed.
The cost of doing the same amount of business goes up.

Perhaps but hasn't the cost gone up this gen for those developing on the ps3 ? Bluray media is more expensive than dvd. They seem to have dealt with that.

They might have to, since shipping them back is expensive and throwing them out might be illegal/expensive.

Most likely dumping a few hundred thousand discs is also illegal and expensive.

think they'll just steal the bargain bin flash drives. The theft demand might require bigger packaging to keep theft down.
If it were read-only, they'd be useless as drives, but then we're back to the disposal and inventory problem.

Of course read only with only a small maount of cache to lock it to that system could prevent the used market and theft. Actually you could create a second busniess for devs and the console owner. Through xbox live paying a small fee you can unlock the game so you can sell it. That way everyone gets paid. Or it might have to be something gamestop does and the developers get paid.

So somebody other than the console maker has to eat the cost of the format.
Retailers may eat it, the publishers might eat it, a higher-price means the customer might eat the price, which might drive down the attach rate and cut down the sales volume of all those possibly cheaper to ship game

Everyone can share it. Console maker , retailers , publishers and customers.

Another nail in the "cheap SSD" coffin:

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=13697

Implication is that they're already selling SSDs cheaper than they want to. i.e. how can the price fall further so rapidly as some may desire?
16-Dec-2008 19:32

If I was sitting around with extra fab capacity and someone offered to fill it with margins i like , i'd jump at it. Sounds to me like this is good news for the idea.

I also think the problem is the glut of low capacity flash on the market and with the higher capacitys there isn't much to fill it with. As the high def camcorders come down in price and other media starts to make the leap to flash demand will go back up.

 

[specwarGP2]

Well I don't see a problem with an ssd device. They are rewritable. With the speeds I sugested earlier it would take seconds to reflash the device. As for them being refurbished it depends if they ever left the plant. Do you consider a tv that was created but never left the plant and found to have a bad firmware and updated to be a refurbished product ? do you think that the company making those tvs consider it refurbished ? They will be sold as new to retail. Same with a car that is found to need a recall. Any that haven't been sold yet and have the recall fixed aren't considered refurbished and have the costs cut.

Not to mention that consumers will never know.

I'm not talking about stuff at the factory. I'm talking about unsold inventory at retail. Your reflashing idea makes no sense because those unsold devices can no longer legally be sold as new once they are reflashed. A reflashed game will steal sales away from a new one of the same title, which in turn will cause those new games to get refurbed and reflashed and sold for less than new in a vicious cycle.

Reflashing will probably cause publishers to LOSE money.

 

[Brad Grenz]

Really? Really . Your telling me they can use machines to back the ssd into the cases but they can't use a machine to extract them from the packaging ?

I find this unlikely.

Oh, surely it's feasible to design equipment to automate such work, but now you're spending millions to design, build and deploy lines of automated repurposing machines that will take up space in manufacturing plants that could be used for a profit making line instead of a loss reduction one to do something so fundamentally stupid in the first place. Congratulations, your bad ideas just keep getting less practical all the time!

 

[3dilettante]

Set up a connection that only exists on the system. don't liscense out the connection and you should be fine. Also if you can create a high speed device it would be even harder for cheap knock offs to come onto the market.

A completely proprietary and very different protocol would help, at least for a time.

The prospect of a modded RAID board or something that can emulate the connection to disks that would offer the same stats as a drive that costs hundreds to thousands of dollars would be a big draw.

A low-speed device would be cheaper, more reliable (remember having to blow on the connectors for carts back in the day? Try that now with the equivalent of ESATA), and wouldn't have hackers trying to turn the cart into a super cheap SSD hard drive.

With what equipment ?

With whatever equipment that can make reflashing an already written and secured and shipped game to a totally different game as quickly and cheaply as would be necessary for retail volumes.
Being able to reflash after it has been shipped to stores or distribution centers would save the hefty expense of reshipping the product, although not so much with the repackaging.

If you look at the psp and ds , its not the formats that are being hacked and used , its other components like the psp memory stick and design flaws.

Those formats aren't in massive demand in other markets. High-speed SSD drives would be in very high demand.

The only thing protecting it is software and at some point that will be hacked. Next gen they wont even get the buffer of expensive media with bluray discs.

How would the hardware really intelligently understand it has been circumvented?

Perhaps but hasn't the cost gone up this gen for those developing on the ps3 ? Bluray media is more expensive than dvd. They seem to have dealt with that.

There are too many conflicting market and economic pressures to say just how successfuly dealt with the media price increase has been.
The flash scheme ups the ante by an order of magnitude, so what could be dealt with with Bluray may not be enough.

Most likely dumping a few hundred thousand discs is also illegal and expensive.

Polycarbonate is thrown away in massive amounts daily in things other than discs.

Of course read only with only a small maount of cache to lock it to that system could prevent the used market and theft. Actually you could create a second busniess for devs and the console owner. Through xbox live paying a small fee you can unlock the game so you can sell it.

Let's hope the RROD is solved by then, and nobody ever wants to bring a game to a friend's house.

Everyone can share it. Console maker , retailers , publishers and customers.

The benefits are mostly for the console maker, though.

If I was sitting around with extra fab capacity and someone offered to fill it with margins i like , i'd jump at it. Sounds to me like this is good news for the idea.

Not if it endangers the super-lucrative SSD hard drive market.

 

[Dregun]

I guess I'm still confused on the difference between throwing SSD games away at the retailer or throwing Blu-Ray games away at the retailer. No matter what version of that game you throw away the cost of packaging, shipping and manufacturing is lost. The only extra value lost is in the SSD's themselves as compared to the cost of the Blu-ray disc..

I'm also not sure we would have to limit only 1 game from being flashed onto the SSD. Why couldn't they use that space to flash 2,3 heck even 4 games onto the ssd and have the person who bought it choose what game they want to activate upon putting it into their machine. If one game bombs they wouldn't necessarily have to send all of them back, also this would possibly cut down on other costs as the individual just might want to activate another game on that SSD limiting packaging and shipping costs.

Downfall is it might get complicated having 4 games being listed on one package for the consumer. But it sure would be nice to go out and buy Madden 2010 and have NBA Live 2010, MLB 2010 and NHL 2010 ready for you to activate anytime you want. You want to buy Resistance 4?, well you can activate R&C and save $5 using this card. Want to borrow Resistance 4 to your friend but want to play R&C, no problem the machine copies R&C and disables the R&C game from the card until its re-inserted into your machine.

I don't know how many gamers are impulsive buyers like me, but if I'm sitting at home and I'm bored with the games I have "BUT" I have the option right then and there to buy other games. This allows me to play them right away (no long downloads) without getting my fat @ss off the couch you better believe I'll pony up cash even for a garbage game if I'm bored enough.

Heck they could even institue a "Rental" system using the cards, you buy the card and any game of your choice is activated. Then you can choose to "rent" the ability to play any of the other games on the card (think Divx) for a set amount of days. So you can have Madden 2010 and pay $3.50-$5.00 to rent temporary activation on the card to let you play the other game of your choosing for as many days as the "rental" is good for. If you decide to buy the game after or during your rental they take that amount you paid off of the cost of the game. They could instill a "whole card activation rental" that allows you to pay a slightly higher rental fee to activate every game on the card for a set amount of days. Even better if they were to allow the "renter" to choose rental options based on "hours played" or "days rented". Think you can beat the game in 10 hours or plan on only being able to play the game for a couple of hours a day, great option. If you plan on playing the game a lot (possibly multiplayer sessions) then maybe the daily rental is a better option. Either way having SSD's gives the player options that you cant have with a non-writable media.

Back to the orginal idea.

Why can't they take those "refurbished" ssd's that need reflashing and put "greatest hits" on them instead of new releases, that would now justify the costs. So you wouldn't have to worry about selling a $60 dollar game at a reduced cost because of the refurb, you take a reduced cost game and put it on a reduced cost product and sell it for what you would sell the greatest hits game for to begin with...a reduced cost.

I think SSD's are a viable solution and a much better solution then downloads. While they will never get to the insane low prices of disc replication; you can still use the media in a cost effective way if you plan ahead.

 

[AzBat]

I'm still trying to understand the whole point of refurbishing SSD games? Why does the SSD have to be included with the game in the first place? Why can't they just be a separate purchase like a memory card? Microsoft has a method in place for purchasing Live Arcade games at retail. It's a plastic card just like pre-paid phone cards. You purchase the game as a card and then redeem the 16-digit number via Live. No expensive packaging or shipping. If you bring SSDs into the process, they could let you activate it at checkout and move the content automatically to a SSD of your choice. If you buy the largest one they offer, it could contain multiple games. Wasn't the whole point of SSDs at retail to get around the issue of people of not having the Internet(or a fast enough connection) to download the content?

Tommy McClain

 

[manux]

I'm still trying to understand the whole point of refurbishing SSD games? Why does the SSD have to be included with the game in the first place? Why can't they just be a separate purchase like a memory card? Microsoft has a method in place for purchasing Live Arcade games at retail. It's a plastic card just like pre-paid phone cards. You purchase the game as a card and then redeem the 16-digit number via Live. No expensive packaging or shipping. If you bring SSDs into the process, they could let you activate it at checkout and move the content automatically to a SSD of your choice. If you buy the largest one they offer, it could contain multiple games. Wasn't the whole point of SSDs at retail to get around the issue of people of not having the Internet(or a fast enough connection) to download the content?

Tommy McClain

I doubt cheap SSDs are fast enough to make download scheme work. If average game next gen would be around 25GB then downloading to a SSD having insanely fast 100MB/s write speed still would take around 4 minutes. I doubt that cheap SSD's will even have that kind of write speeds in time for next gen so download time should be longer than that.

 

[MfA]

The ratio of storage to I/O circuitry on present day flash is very high ... bandwidth could easily be scaled up, you just can't use COTS flash.

 

[eastmen]

completely proprietary and very different protocol would help, at least for a time.

The prospect of a modded RAID board or something that can emulate the connection to disks that would offer the same stats as a drive that costs hundreds to thousands of dollars would be a big draw.

A low-speed device would be cheaper, more reliable (remember having to blow on the connectors for carts back in the day? Try that now with the equivalent of ESATA), and wouldn't have hackers trying to turn the cart into a super cheap SSD hard drive

Mabye but if you soder them to a custom board with a custom pin configuration it should be pretty much useless to the after market.

Also why woud u need a slower drive? How about a custom verison of usb 3.

Those formats aren't in massive demand in other markets. High-speed SSD drives would be in very high demand.

there are already CF drives that let u use two cf cards for an ssd. I don't think it be long for a company to start making them for sdhc cards.

How would the hardware really intelligently understand it has been circumvented?

beats me , I'm not a hardware engineer

Let's hope the RROD is solved by then, and nobody ever wants to bring a game to a friend's house.

They can lock it to an account / hardware. If I buy a game on the insanely popular wii through virtual console I can't bring that game to a friends house unless I bring my whole console.

The benefits are mostly for the console maker, though.

thats true but if the console maker is saving enough on the console htey may be willing to take smaller royalitys at the start untill the scale is there ot make it worth while.

Not if it endangers the super-lucrative SSD hard drive market.

Well if they swith to a rom only type set up it shouldn't affect the ssd market.

 

[eastmen]

I doubt cheap SSDs are fast enough to make download scheme work. If average game next gen would be around 25GB then downloading to a SSD having insanely fast 100MB/s write speed still would take around 4 minutes. I doubt that cheap SSD's will even have that kind of write speeds in time for next gen so download time should be longer than that.

SDHC can go up to 30MB/s put a few chips in a raid formation. Like a 8x2gig set up and you have a 66second time frame to download to a card. for a 16 gig game.

Since they'd be making something custom they could most likely up the speed for each chip for faster transfer rates.

 

[manux]

SDHC can go up to 30MB/s put a few chips in a raid formation. Like a 8x2gig set up and you have a 66second time frame to download to a card. for a 16 gig game.

Since they'd be making something custom they could most likely up the speed for each chip for faster transfer rates.

Would you care to elaborate why the cheap and even not so cheap ssd drives/usb sticks are so damn slow if it's easy and cheap to make the write speeds fast? And that 30MB/s would make the download time in my example 12+ minutes which is pretty unbearable.

 

[eastmen]

Would you care to elaborate why the cheap and even not so cheap ssd drives/usb sticks are so damn slow if it's easy and cheap to make the write speeds fast? And that 30MB/s would make the download time in my example 12+ minutes which is pretty unbearable.

because they can make a profit on them. Not many people are making them at the moment. You can buy sdhc cards at the 30MB speed but they are useless except when transfering to your hardrive. Even avchd at 24mbps (maxed out spec) only needs a 6MB/s write speed

also it would only take 4 seconds to download 1 gig at 250MB/s .

So 10 gigs would take 40 seconds. 20 gigs would take 1m 20s. Thats not bad at all. Its about the time it takes a clerk at gamestop to get the game from the back room or behind the counter anyway.

You figure that next gen with more powerfull hardware you shoudl be able to get better compresion. Factor in that today xbox 360 games max out at 6.8 gigs. Round that up to 7 and even a 16 gig capacity would be greater than two times the size of an xbox 360 game. 16 gigs would take just 1m 4sec to load.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

You figure that next gen with more powerfull hardware you shoudl be able to get better compresion.

There is no better compression! We visited this in depth this gen, and I found a table of archive algorithms and their compression ratios, and the deifference between the very best and the average was single-digit percentages. From 1 GB down to 990 MBs isn't a saving anyone's going to sweat over!

There's reasonable reason to think next-gen we'll actually see some realtime procedural content creation, which may well reduce the storage requirements, but whatever the future holds, better compression isn't really it. That's only of use on large media files, video and audio, where you can always trade capacity for quality anyway so that's going to hamper a game's creation.

 

[specwarGP2]

Would you care to elaborate why the cheap and even not so cheap ssd drives/usb sticks are so damn slow if it's easy and cheap to make the write speeds fast? And that 30MB/s would make the download time in my example 12+ minutes which is pretty unbearable.

He cant elaborate why. He doesn't even have the slightest clue of the base cost of the devices let alone the cost of the logic required to RAID them together. Its all pie in the sky theorizing not based in reality at all.

 

[Blazkowicz]

there's no need to talk about raid, the controller in a SSD already takes care of the multiple flash chips it contains and that pretty much explains why some do 200MB/s reading, others 100MB/s and a typical USB drive much less.