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

[-tkf-]

I'd hope its flash
A 12x bluray drive will be spining at 10,000rpm which is what a dvd drive will spin at for maximum speed also as past that the disc will shater while spining. So a 12x bluray drive will sound the same as a 24x dvd drive.

For now bdxl is a limit due to the small amount of capacity to make the devices.
however you could just go to flash with 300MB/s and vastly superior random acess to hardrives
If you google around you will find its about 50cents per GB of flash from Intel/Micron press releases

But going to 4 gigs of ram is a 8 times increase in avaliable ram for assets. Going to 8 gigs would be a 16 times increase.

You only need a 8xspeed BR drive to get the same transfer rate as a 24xDVD, unless the Wiki we both are using is wrong. So at any rate the BR drive should be quitter.

And you would need at least a 250GB SSD drive in the future consoles, considering that they will most likely go with 500GB minimum i would be very surprised if they go for SSD considering the price difference.

And of course i prefer flash, if i don´t have to compromise on game content. I hope you are right that the price will be so low that it "wont matter". But i am pretty sure that whatever little cost difference there is at manufacturing it will grow beyond that when we end at retail. If it costs 5 dollars more at manufacturing to create a game that cost is most likely double that when we end at retail. And the 5 dollars is maybe 20 times the cost of a BR disc.

Besides, the idea that the future consoles isn´t able to play Blu-Ray movies seems unlikely to me, except Nintendo that might go back to VHS. I expect MS and Sony to be going out with all guns shooting.

 

[AlphaWolf]

MS gains nothing by adding blu-ray, in fact it's in direct competition with their Zune VOD, netflix and other services. Blu-ray inclusion is really not a plus for them.

And 2 years from now are people really going to be thinking, boy I wish I could have a big loud hot blu-ray player that costs 3x as much?

 

[corduroygt]

Blu-ray's a checkmark and it's quite important for a lot of people. Optical still has more than 10x revenue of DD. PS2 and the Wii are 2 disc based consoles that are quite small, cheap, and power efficient.
Adding 3G is an absolutely terrible idea. It's an unneeded cost and why should I pay for it when I have my broadband internet connection. The best case would be an optional accessory. 3G by itself doesn't guarantee reception everywhere either.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Blu-ray's a checkmark and it's quite important for a lot of people.

More than 130 million people have bought consoles in the last 5 years that didn't agree.

<edit> and I'm pretty sure lower power, smaller footprint, quieter and faster are checkmarks as well

 

[Barbarian]

Blur-ray is a double edged sword. Even for Sony who get revenue either way (arguably less from the Blu-ray only use of PS3).
For Microsoft it makes even less sense. Honestly I think they will try everything else first before settling on Blu-ray:
1) Proprietary optical format (possibly a HD-DVD derivative). This has the advantage of making piracy a lot harder.
2) HDD only (relying on Downloads and/or Flash/Kiosks to get media on it). This is more risky but is also more future proof and cheaper.

 

[corduroygt]

More than 130 million people have bought consoles in the last 5 years that didn't agree.

<edit> and I'm pretty sure lower power, smaller footprint, quieter and faster are checkmarks as well

They didn't agree to it at a higher pricepoint. It still matters in other territories where blu-ray player prices are higher than here. There's also the issue of people wanting to play their Halo Reach on the new xbox through their DVD. BC is very helpful in the first couple years of a new generation where a lot of good next gen games are still in development.

You can get external Blu-rays powered via USB these days so power consumption is between 2.5-5W, which is insignificant compared to the CPU and GPU.

 

[specwarGP2]

MS gains nothing by adding blu-ray, in fact it's in direct competition with their Zune VOD, netflix and other services. Blu-ray inclusion is really not a plus for them.

And 2 years from now are people really going to be thinking, boy I wish I could have a big loud hot blu-ray player that costs 3x as much?

Well 3D is supposed to be the next big thing, and the only foreseeable way to watch 3D movies is on blu-ray. That could be an important bullet point to have since consoles seem to be the entertainment box of the future.

The only way games distributed on flash will work is if Sony goes along with it, which won't happen for PS4 at least.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Well 3D is supposed to be the next big thing, and the only foreseeable way to watch 3D movies is on blu-ray. That could be an important bullet point to have since consoles seem to be the entertainment box of the future.

1) I'm one of the unwashed billions that sincerely believes 3D is the next big flash in the pan. I can barely stand to watch '3D' movies in a theater, watching in my home doesn't sound like a privilege.
2) Blu-ray players already do that, for less money than a new console... in 2 years much less money, assuming 3D is still cared about.
3) Blu-ray isn't the only possible way to deliver 3D content. There's already these things called cable and vod.

The only way games distributed on flash will work is if Sony goes along with it, which won't happen for PS4 at least.

That's akin to suggesting that the only way blu-ray could be successful is if MS and Nintendo go along with it. There's going to be millions and millions of flash devices built every year for the foreseeable future even if it isn't adopted as the prime distribution model for a console. And that's kinda moot as Sony already has sorta gone along with it, check out their new handheld specs.

 

[manux]

Do we have any idea about the sizes of NGP flash carts, speeds and game pricing? That might give us some clue about how feasible flash carts would be for next gen consoles.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Here is the issue why are you assuming that it will be size of a 2.5inch drive? Laptop drives are far smaller in volume. It'd be safer to say to use them.

Eh? Both 2.5" and 1.8" drives are laptop drives. With 2.5" drives generally being cheaper for similar size and speed. Often 1.8" drives have to sacrifice speed. Now if we're talking SSD's then size won't affect cost, but SSD's are already an order of magnitude more expensive than mechanical drives.

Beyond this you're not paying all that money to support optical media when the real money maker is online distribution. If Microsoft makes $9 on a $60 game bought at a store they probably make $18 or 30% on a game bought online. So to them some form of digitial distribution would probably be preferable to optical based distribution and im sure that publishers would eat a couple of dollars per SKU to remove the 2nd hand market from the equation.

Here's the thing though. In the retail space you have multiple sources each taking a cut of the sale price. With DD you remove everyone except for the console maker and publisher/developer. If we assume MS get's 30% that leaves 70% for the publisher/developer. That's a far cry from the current situation where Publisher gets ~40% (this is for PC, it may be much less than that for console since PC doesn't have console maker licensing fees). But part of that 40% must go to manufacturing/packaging/first stage of distribution/etc. The developer in this case often only receives ~15% of the sale price at most. And out of that there are still other fee's associated. So the developer who actually made the game often ends up with only ~10% of the sale price. Again that's an example for PC published games. Each of those shares for developer and publisher may be a fair bit less on console due to console maker fees.

On a 60 USD game that may only end up being 6 USD. So in theory, they could sell the same game over DD for 25 USD with MS taking 30% and then splitting the remaining 70% with the publisher and still make slightly more than 6 USD. Or developers that can afford to self fund and thus don't need a publisher for retail distribution and sales anymore, they can pocket the full 70%.

That's a huge win for for developement studios as soon as you remove the need for retail distribution, manufacturing, packaging, and all the other baggage associated with retail you thus remove much of the need for a publisher except on high budget games or mid budget games that you can't self fund.

Gamestop/McDonalds/Your local gas station/7 Eleven/a Kiosk/whoever could charge you you 10 USD to load a game onto the media of your choice, or swap out flash carts of a preset size already preloaded with the game you want. And in that case your final price for the game would be 35 USD which is still cheaper than current retail. Or 25 USD if you can copy it from a friend or download it off broadband. Or heck, a place like McDonalds could offer it as a complimentary service with the purchase of a combo meal.

Although I doubt the price of a game would drop down as low as 25 USD for a AAA title, it's entirely possible for them to drop into the 30-40 USD range.

However, all of that is only possible if 1 game = 1 media container method of game distribution disappears. If not, publishers will remain at the mercy of retailers and the price for DD will never drop hence redistributable games won't be attractive, developers will continue to make very little per game sale, game developement risk will still remain high, etc...

Using 2.5" or 1.8" HDDs would be better simply because they're removeable and can be taken to a kiosk etc and plugged in, also they use less power and are smaller again. It makes sense to use the HDD in that doubled up fashion. Personally I don't see how the space issues will be a problem, once we're over 500GB at the start of the next generation most probably won't even go through half that space.

A removeable HDD (like the X360 Slim) that you can just take in and have a game loaded onto it would certainly be interesting. But I think having an SD card slot, USB 3.0 port and/or eSATA connector on a future console would be better. Let the user determine how they wish to get the game onto their machine at whatever cost they are comfortable with.

Regards,
SB

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Blu-ray's a checkmark and it's quite important for a lot of people. Optical still has more than 10x revenue of DD. PS2 and the Wii are 2 disc based consoles that are quite small, cheap, and power efficient.
Adding 3G is an absolutely terrible idea. It's an unneeded cost and why should I pay for it when I have my broadband internet connection. The best case would be an optional accessory. 3G by itself doesn't guarantee reception everywhere either.

For consoles perhaps because there really is no other option except for select classic games usually.

There are indications from a variety of sources that at least in the US, DD has surpassed physical media both in number of sales as well as revenue for "traditional" style games.

And as regards to consoles, more below...

Do we have any idea about the sizes of NGP flash carts, speeds and game pricing? That might give us some clue about how feasible flash carts would be for next gen consoles.

IMO, PSP2 is potentially a very important transition device. I'm assuming that they'll be using some kind of proprietary non-reuseable cart (I'll be pleasantly surprised if they instead use some sort of re-useable cart).

PSP2 is going to be a very important test case for the feasibility of DD distribution as the preferred method of game distribution with game carts available for people that don't have uncapped broadband or don't want to buy things digitally.

From what I've read, it appears that everything released on game carts will be available through DD day and date (if this turns out not to be the case ala PSP Go, then it's a failure in more ways than one). But, not everything released over DD will be available on game carts.

So, in many ways, it'll replicate what's been available on PC with regards to game distribution for many years now. This is the first step to the future console gaming landscape that I envision. The only thing being different is the use of reuseable game transfer medium (future consoles) instead of secure carts permanently loaded with 1 game (PSP2).

Regards,
SB

 

[eastmen]

Caught you in a lie again. Show me where it's .50 per GB, show me where I can get a GB flash for less than a buck?
The lowest 2GB SD card price according to www.dramexchange.com is around $4. You cannot get pure chip prices, there's connectors, assembly and casing, so SD card pricing is more accurate.

PS2 sold about 1.5 billion discs in its lifetime. Multiply by $5 (It's more realistically $10 but I'll let it slide) and you get 7.5 billion dollars. Consumers aren't going to pay that* so the makers will have eat the cost. Especially 6 months down the road with half price greatest hits editions, that $5 will represent a whopping 18% of the final selling price before retailers, etc. get their cut.

Flash cost structure only makes sense as cache soldered to the board for next generation. Three delivery options, listed from highest to lowest sales are listed below:

1. Disc,
2. DD,
3. Take your portable USB device to a kiosk to load a game.

* Unless they're still butthurt over Blu-ray 5 years down the road

You haven't caught me in anything


http://www.pcworld.com/article/1881...irst_to_25nm_with_new_flash_memory_chips.html

Objective Analysis estimates the manufacturing cost of the new 25nm flash chips will be about $0.50 per gigabyte (GB), compared to $1.75 per gigabyte for mainstream 45nm flash. The market price of flash chips has been hovering around $2.00 per gigabyte, Objective Analysis said, and will likely remain there throughout 2010.

Dram exhange doesn't matter as you can see prices change drasticly on it.

What matters is the price per gig when ordering millions of copies. A launching system would need at minimum 20 or so Million flash memory cards.

Your link doesn't tell us who makes the flash memory chip , what micron process its on and so on.


If you go to flash spot price on your system 8GBs of flash is 7.30 which means that whatever they are measuring and how many diffrent hands are in the pie its still only 91 cents per GB in Febuary of 2011

Even in Nand flash contract price in memory card/ufd its a low of 7.20 for 8GB of nand. Which means its even less ! only 90 cents a gig .

And once again what nand are we looking at , is it 32nm nand , is it 25nm nand is it the new 3bit cell 25nm I linked you to above.

Is this the prices directly from the nand manufacturer or is this through a third party company in which case of that 90 cents per GB the manufacturer and third party both get a % of it for profit.


I've been posting the links for you , you could at least read what i post instead of assuming . You know when you assume you make an ass out of u and me.

 

[Squilliam]

Here's the thing though. In the retail space you have multiple sources each taking a cut of the sale price. With DD you remove everyone except for the console maker and publisher/developer. If we assume MS get's 30% that leaves 70% for the publisher/developer.

Gamestop/McDonalds/Your local gas station/7 Eleven/a Kiosk/whoever could charge you you 10 USD to load a game onto the media of your choice, or swap out flash carts of a preset size already preloaded with the game you want. And in that case your final price for the game would be 35 USD which is still cheaper than current retail. Or 25 USD if you can copy it from a friend or download it off broadband. Or heck, a place like McDonalds could offer it as a complimentary service with the purchase of a combo meal.

A removeable HDD (like the X360 Slim) that you can just take in and have a game loaded onto it would certainly be interesting. But I think having an SD card slot, USB 3.0 port and/or eSATA connector on a future console would be better. Let the user determine how they wish to get the game onto their machine at whatever cost they are comfortable with.

Regards,
SB

Well so long as they can offer the 'same deal' at retail, I think they can get away with selling direct download games through kiosks at retail or over the net directly for $50-60 with a $10-20 premium being attached to titles which come on physical media and hence have a box and can be resold or lent if the user wishes. That way people feel they are getting a better deal in some ways with the digital distribution and retailers aren't left out in the cold. As a bonus for retailers selling games could actually end up taking less space with no stolen goods/shrinkage between physical media and kiosks being higher value per unit of floor area in terms of overall revenue.

I still like the idea of kiosks also being used to convert current games/movies into digital copies and destroying the original at the same time whilst also being able to print game media cartridges on the spot. Even if it happens to take about 3 minutes to complete a transaction on a flash cartridge that is still in the realm of what people are willing to wait for. Theres also no limit as to what content could be offered the same kiosks could also be used for movies and music and other media. It could be quite a lucrative distribution empire if one console maker got 50,000 kiosks into 20,000 retail outlets in America for instance. If it does an average of $600 business per day you're looking at $1.6B revenue per year which isn't something the likes of Alan Greenburg would sniff at.

 

[-tkf-]

You haven't caught me in anything


http://www.pcworld.com/article/1881...irst_to_25nm_with_new_flash_memory_chips.html




Dram exhange doesn't matter as you can see prices change drasticly on it.

What matters is the price per gig when ordering millions of copies. A launching system would need at minimum 20 or so Million flash memory cards.

Your link doesn't tell us who makes the flash memory chip , what micron process its on and so on.


If you go to flash spot price on your system 8GBs of flash is 7.30 which means that whatever they are measuring and how many diffrent hands are in the pie its still only 91 cents per GB in Febuary of 2011

Even in Nand flash contract price in memory card/ufd its a low of 7.20 for 8GB of nand. Which means its even less ! only 90 cents a gig .

And once again what nand are we looking at , is it 32nm nand , is it 25nm nand is it the new 3bit cell 25nm I linked you to above.

Is this the prices directly from the nand manufacturer or is this through a third party company in which case of that 90 cents per GB the manufacturer and third party both get a % of it for profit.


I've been posting the links for you , you could at least read what i post instead of assuming . You know when you assume you make an ass out of u and me.

How can you consider 0.1$ for a Blu-Ray expensive when flash is cheap at 100 times that price

I think we had another discussion about using flash, where it was revealed that besides the very high cost, the manufactoring of cards with content was slower than especially Blu-Ray. Which adds even more to the cost besides just the chips and parts.

 

[MarkoIt]

Nintendo DS used flash memory in 2004, ando also Sony will with PSP2.
What was the price back then for a 2 gigabit flash chip?
And also: it's really hard to speculate about this aspect because there are trade off that we might not consider. For example, Blu-ray royalties and security. SDXC format supports encryption and high level of security. They might customize the card in a way that could slow down a lot piracy (for example extra pins for security).
To me this configuration looks perfect:
32 GB SSD on die, 2,5" SATA support (both SSD and HD), flash memory reader SDXC compatible.

Since the cost of physical media will be higher, DD game costs will decrease in order to increase the DD market. As games will be get bigger, DD will also grow... in the end i think it may have little financial impact on the console maker, and be a good selling feature (thinner, quieter, cooler).

 

[corduroygt]

There are indications from a variety of sources that at least in the US, DD has surpassed physical media both in number of sales as well as revenue for "traditional" style games.

I'd like to see your "variety of sources" because that's impossible, especially when Black Ops makes more money in 6 weeks than what the entire XBL makes in a whole year.

 

[corduroygt]

You haven't caught me in anything


http://www.pcworld.com/article/1881...irst_to_25nm_with_new_flash_memory_chips.html

Current free market vs. worthless estimates, I know which one I'd put stock in. You're also totally discounting casing, assembly, and connectors. That's why SD cards are much more reliable indicator.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I'd like to see your "variety of sources" because that's impossible, especially when Black Ops makes more money in 6 weeks than what the entire XBL makes in a whole year.

Off the top of my head look at the NewZoo compiled survey data. There should be a link in the European console sales thread. The total numbers are questionable, IMO, but the ratio should be somewhat indicative (10% for DD and 9% for physical retail). The big publishers are also mentioning DD more and more and smaller publishers are citing DD as the primary reason they are doing so well, with some consideration of going DD only for some of their published games. As well you have NPD stating that PC digital has surpassed PC retail (http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_100920.html ). That's for sales volume. Reports are that revenue also surpassed retail over the whole of 2010, but noone has posted numbers for that.

Smaller developers are also now considering abandoning traditional publishing as they could make far more money going DD and ignoring the retail space as long as they can self fund their games.

Even the Japanese publishers are mentioning DD more and more in their fiancial reports with more focus on expanding DD offerings or transitioning to DD. DD is going to be big in Japan, IMO. There's been a huge push the past few years to get people to switch from traditional phone service to phone service over internet by NTT. There's a similar push going on with TV services moving to their internet infrastructure. Along with that is a booming business in online games and entertainment which are attached to those TV services but at an additional cost per game. All of the Japanese publishers are looking to capitalize on that. With some farther along (Konami) than others. DD is just a natural extension of that.

When you get to the console space the big publishers are starting to limit the big budget games (money allocated stays roughly the same but fewer titles are developed) that go to retail while expanding their efforts on PSN, XBLA, Steam, Phones, Web games, etc. All of which are just variations on ways to digitally distribute games.

Basically the writing is on the wall. All major publishers would like to move to DD first, but cannot do so until the consoles also move to DD first (PSP2 is a start in that direction). The only question is, how best to service those consumers that can't do DD due to not having access to uncapped broadband. Do we remain with the incredibly expensive to support Optical media (or even more expensive 1 game = 1 flash cart) type of retail distribution? Or a far cheaper and more profitable system featuring reuseable media distribution (flash, HDD, SSD, whatever...)

Or a hybrid retail system where you eliminate most of the manufacturing and distribution chain and go with Secure use once flash carts, where the retailer "manufactures" the secure use once flash cart instead of the publisher. They do this by downloading the secure DD image of the game and then loading onto the approved use once secure flash cart at the retail location. That will, however, quite likely result in up front costs similar to but less than traditional distribution of optical media to retail. And if you're going to do this, why not just go the extra step to far cheaper reuseable distribution?

Regards,
SB

 

[-tkf-]

why not just go the extra step to far cheaper reuseable distribution

What about those of us that prefer to keep their games for eternity?

 

[eastmen]

How can you consider 0.1$ for a Blu-Ray expensive when flash is cheap at 100 times that price

I think we had another discussion about using flash, where it was revealed that besides the very high cost, the manufactoring of cards with content was slower than especially Blu-Ray. Which adds even more to the cost besides just the chips and parts.

Do you have a link to any articles stating that its 10 cents for a bluray.

With flash you'd need to program the data.

300MB/s would mean each 16gig cart would take 53 seconds to write. 32 would of course double to 106 seconds. However carts can be writen to in series so you could write 100s of them at once depending on your equipment.

Aside from that we already have the ds as proof that large ramps of software could be done and sony will be going flash for the NGP.