Now figure out how many used sales caused lost new sales. Compare the two values and then you will have your answer.
Alternative distribution to optical disks : SSD, cards, and download*
- Thread starter Cheezdoodles
- Start date
Now figure out how many used sales caused lost new sales. Compare the two values and then you will have your answer.
aye its really a good spin on it.
Basicly what he is saying is that 50% of new game sales result in 1 or more used titles entering the market.
If the value is anything like gamestop you could have 10-15 titles traded in for a single new title
I guess it depends on if price is the only thing you measure the value on. Fine its about twice the price, in your example, but from my quick online search here in Norway its about 200kr difference, that's like 3 beers and my doctor told me to quit wine and beer, but hard spirits is okay for some reason
To me, not saying for everybody, the hassle of going to the store or ordering it online, swapping discs, taking care of the disc, no need to find storage space for the disc etc is worth those 3 beers. I just set it to D/L before going to the office and it was ready when I got home.
Not had time to play it yet, spent lots of time on PSN version of Borderlands, but its on the HDD waiting for me
corduroygt
Banned
Handhelds are a much different animal than home consoles. Handhelds need to be small and have long battery life and their games are not 30-40GB. Sony also said not all games would be on carts, some would only be DD on the NGP.
Sigh we have been over this .
Xbox 360 games are limited to 6.7 gigs.
8 gigs would give them more room than xbox devs currently have. 16 gigs would increase size 2.3 times . 32 gigs would incease size 4.7 times and 64 gigs will give almost 10 times the amount of space over xbox 360 games.
All of them are very fesable next gen , 128 gigs can also be possible by the end of next gen looking at price points.
The majority of ps3 games also fit on a single dvd btw .
Flash would give added benfits .
1) The readers would take up almost no internal space this would free up space in the unit to include a 3.5inch drive over a 2.5 inch drive and also decrease case size.
2) Flash is faster than bluray. They can go with a custom sdxc type of flash using either the SD 3.0 spec of 832 Mbit/s or the SD 4.0 of 2.4Gbit/s those are maximum. However there are already toshiba sdxc cards with 480Mbit/s transfers.
480Mbit/s is 60MB/s and the sd card is silent a 12x bluray drive is only capable of 54MB/s and that will vary across the disc and the seek times will be many times higher than the flash.
3) Flash cards are much smaller than discs. They can reduce the size of the packaging from dvd/bluray sized cases to even DS size or smaller cases . They will be able to ship more at the same time while allowing stores to keep more in stock
4) Each game can come with x amount of writable space in which to store saves or even dlc. This will reduce the need for larger and larger hardrives.
I'd also like to say that optical disc format is no longer a big deal , even bluray has hit the price floor of $50 this black friday. Prices will continue to go down until it no longer matters. If one of the companys go with no optical and pure flash tech they can have a very large advantage over the other companys .
MS can take 8 gig sdhc chips at 60MB/s and make a raid package of 4 of them just like a mini ssd . That would give them 240MB/s of transfer rate with a 32gig foot print. They'd be able to transfer 4 gigs in 16 seconds. A 12x bluray would take 80 seconds. 8 gigs would certianly double that for both putting the flash at 32 seconds and the bluray drive at 160seconds.
Its certianly a great advantage.
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corduroygt
Banned
When your games cost $10 more than the competition to produce, all those advantages do not matter. Maybe you don't realize that using multiple DVDs is becoming more common on the 360 for games (ME2, Castlevania, Dead Space 2, Forza 3, FF13, etc.) and one reason PS3 games have noticably superior graphics variety over 360 games is the ability to put more models and more textures on disc, not to mention the sound not being limited to 640k dolby digital.
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And you pulled that out of your ass how ?
What if moving to flash only costs the company $2 per game. There are a ton of people who would eat a $2 price increase to have no load times
Look nintendo did just fine with the ds vs the psp . Sony even moved to flash for the psp 2 . It only makes sense as it has many advantages and the only disadvantage is cost and even that will change over the 5-10 years of the next gen consoles.
Your right but it will hardly matter if the cost isn't high already. It will only matter if you want to make a game that is extremely large
Look Nintendo used carts for the DS . They were able to make profits on games at $25-$35. They even had budget titles come out as low as $20.
So the question is how much will moving to carts for consoles really cost. It certianly isn't the same as back with the n64 and it will certianly change over time.
64gigs may cost $10 at the start of the gen , but it wont cost $10 at the end of the gen. 8 gigs may cost $2 at the start of the gen and at the end of the gen its true , but then again 16gigs may end up at $2 by the end of the gen also and a developer will be able to use that space to their advantage. If the game only takes 8 gigs they could sell dlc that will install onto the card for faster load times over the hardrives and will save consumers money.
Personaly I'd pay $65 for a game on a super fast flash card vs $60 on a bluray. I'm sure many people wouldn't flinch at a $5 price hike .
No, we can safely say that Sony decided something else for their NGP and nothing else.
UMD had 3 significant advantages, supposedly cheaper than carts and hard to copy and 1.2GB max size.
They chose speed and lower battery usage instead of cost and capacity for the NGP.
Blu-Ray should still be "enough" for the NGC from Sony.
DuckThor Evil
Legend
The fact that they did is a clear statement that carts are becoming more viable each and every day. If they can be used in high end handhelds, then the base line cost isn't totally out of the question for home consoles either. It's clear that the capacity of flash has grown faster than the size demands for games.
I personally think that the flash size/price wont quite reach the optimal point for the next gen home consoles to replace optical media, but it's not far off. Flash + DD would work and create many different possibilities. When you take in to account all the other benefits it would bring, speed, size of the console = more attractive design or more room for cooling, card interface is cheaper than optical drive and so forth, it doesn't look that bad.
Next gen games however are going to need more space than this gen especially on Xbox, however the consoles are not out today. I do think it will take one more gen to get rid of optical completely, but I could throw it away sooner, especially when it should provide better user experience.
It´s statement allright, but considering Nintendo have done this since forever on their handhelds does not prove anything either.
On the contrary they moved from carts to Disc to DVD on their Consoles, and i would be surprised if they moved back to Carts for Wii2
tongue_of_colicab
Veteran
I do think that 5 euro extra would be a big deal. Games are already quite expensive. You often pay 70 euro's for a new ps3 game around here.
However I do agree with you. Flash seems like the future. However not at a higher price for consumers. I think somewhere along the line people might need to accept a little bit less profit.
But like you said you will also save a lot of money buy going with flash so that might not be such a big problem.
You don't have to include a big ''expensive'' optical drive anymore (I'm sure those things are a lot more expensive than a card reader), you save money on the size of the machine itself, you save money on shipping the machine as now the box is smaller, you save money on shipping games because you now have a package that is 2 or 3 times smaller, you save money on having to store the games because of size etc.
Now I have no idea at all what kind of costs are involved with shipping but if we say flash memory will always be 2 euro's more expensive than a disk, with all the costs saved, wouldn't you be able to maybe save close that that 2 euro's?
Persoanlly I would love for games to go flash based. It's been more than 3 years ago since I last had a optical disk drive in my pc. They are loud, large and slow and you can install almost everything by network or by usb these days.
DuckThor Evil
Legend
Nintendo has never really needed space for their handheld games and thus never had the need to do anything about it, however as costs conscious as they are it imo is also a pro argument for carts.
Wii2 is going to be interesting in this regard, if it's a low end machine with little ram, then fastening load times or bigger room for cooling is not required and continuing with optical would seem like an obvious choice, however carts would also provide enough space for games on such console.
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Sony went with umd with the psp because they poured alot of money into it. It was a failure on all acounts however.
1) Movies on it didn't take off and failed with 3 diffrent attempts. Due to the fast growth of flash
2) The average game on psp is under 600MBs and few use dual layer. Flash would have been a viable with slightly better compresion as 512 meg flash was inexpensive at the time and shortly after launch even 1 gig flash was cheap
3) UMDs did nothing to stop piracy as flash grew to huge amounts and people just dumped the umds onto flash
I agree on alot of your points. Flash might miss the next gen but not the one after that. I just hope its viable this time around and we do have a chance.
Micron (joint venture with intel) has doubled its density every 18 months for nand. In late 2010 they started production on 25nm nand which made their 64Gb TLC 20% smaller. Not only that but they went from MLC to TLC this generation.
IF next gen consoles hit in 2013 we should see them on an even smaller process node than 25nm . Which will allow drops again.
And like you say and i've siad they can create a much smaller form factor without the optical drive
Also as I mentioned 8 gigs of nand is very cheap right now and will get even cheaper. For a consumer end product SD cards are already hitting $20 for a 16 gig card. for 16 gig capcitys nand purchase orders in the tens of millions will be very cheap for MS /Sony / Nintendo . I think 16 gigs is the optimum size at the start of next gen. It holds more than twice the data of Ms's dvds Some games may require 32 gigs however
I don't know if $5 euro or $5 usd will be that big of a deal. Remember at the start of this gen games did jump $10 and have stayed $10 more than both the ps1 and ps2 generations of games. I think this gen could afford a $5 cost increase.
As for the savings involved with adding all the shipping up. I don't think it will amount to $2 but it will get close.
You can fit two DS boxes in the space of a dvd box and 1 1/2 DS boxes in the space of a bluray height wise. A bluray box is actually skinner than a ds box. You can fit 1 1/2 blurays in the space of a xbox 360 game box.
So I'd say if you made the box nds size and as skinny as a bluray case MS would be able to fit almost 4 games in the same space. A shipment of 52 games (common size shipment box for gamestop from MS ) you could fit in the ball park of 208 of these new boxes.
Of course both can be shrunk further. A dvd box is only as tall as it is for box art. I think the same (to a lesser extent ) is true of the blurays. But still you'd have savings there
I think the biggest thing would come in the form of the console itself.
What i picture in my head is this .
Take the current xbox 360 and remove the optical drive and the 250 gig hardrive. You have now removed a 5.25 and 2.5 inch drive
These are actually big. The 5.25 measures 5.75w 8d 1.63h
But you remove those from the xbox 360. You replace the 2.5inch laptop drive with a standard 3.5inch drive. Capacity here is quite cheap for large amounts.
On newegg a 2TB 3.5 inch drive can be had as low as $80 the 2.5inch drives at the same price would net you a 640 gig drive.
The larger drive would be faster also and have more cache . This would save the company money and up the performance
Then you create on the face two custom slots for your sd card (these would be custom also) . You could keep 2 games in at once if you want , the room wouldn't be much more than usb ports.
The xbox 360 would suddenly become either much smaller or they would have had much better room for cooling the system
Silent_Buddha
Legend
I still think DD + user provided external storage transfer mechanism is the best option.
Or to think of it another way. That user provided external storage transfer mechanism would be...a mem cart. Except in the case of a next gen console, the Mem Cart isn't used to store game saves, but instead to transfer games from another location to your machine if you do not have access to uncapped broadband.
That's a win/win for everyone IMO. Lower cost of console manufacturing (no need for an optical drive, and mem card readers are far cheaper). Less potential waste generated (no packaging needing to be manufactured only to go into local landfills. You also cut out most of the associated costs with physical media - reseller, transportation, packaging, etc. Savings which would allow for either 1) prices to remain the same or 2) less time from launch to price reductions or 3) lower launch prices.
That obviously helps with the increasing cost of game developement combined with the fact that consumers might not be willing to accept price increases for games.
Blatantly stealing from a thread in the PC forum... 1C Publishing director Davyd Syll has this to say about physical media sold through retail compared to Digital Distribution...
In that example, the developers of that game you paid pound £30 for only received £3 when the optical disc was sold. Whereas with DD that software developer ended up getting £20. Now you can see why there are frequent sales and sometimes rather large sales on Steam. As well, why developers of Software would love a DD only world, assuming there was a way for their customers to access that DD.
More money getting to the developers means less developers going out of business, less publishers closing underperforming developer studios, and more games being developed with more variety (instead of trying to stick to "tried and true" game genres).
Mem Carts used to transfer games from a Retail location would only impact that equation a little bit as there'd probably be a small fee paid to the retailer for that service if you don't have any friends that you could just copy the game from. Which would be perfrectly fine since the game won't install and/or run until ownership verification (online or over the phone) happened.
The sooner optical media is marginalized or removed, the better, IMO.
Regards,
SB
corduroygt
Banned
While DD will work great for me, it won't for a lot of people. I would support DD as long as we could rent games as well as resell our games, they can even take a small cut out of that so everyone is happy.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Aye, hell if we used that example from 1C Publishing.
If that £30 game was sold used for £20 and only £5 of the used sale went to the developer, they still made more money than from a new sale of a retail DVD/BRD. This is assuming a DD method of selling used games existed. Although in this specific case, I'm sure the Publisher might want a cut also. So say £8-£10 went to Publisher/Developer to be divided up however.
Regards,
SB
If that £30 game was sold used for £20 and only £5 of the used sale went to the developer, they still made more money than from a new sale of a retail DVD/BRD. This is assuming a DD method of selling used games existed. Although in this specific case, I'm sure the Publisher might want a cut also. So say £8-£10 went to Publisher/Developer to be divided up however.
Regards,
SB
