Calculate into your numbers the cost for 70million blue-ray drives, and the additional structure to support them. I'm guessing $2 or $3.5 billion ($30 to $50 per unit savings) would pay for a few carts. We don't have any real numbers but it's hardly as simple as blue-ray is cheaper so they have to use it.
Alternative distribution to optical disks : SSD, cards, and download*
- Thread starter Cheezdoodles
- Start date
Not an apples to apples comparison exactly. Cheapest blu-ray vs. 25k full color dvd. Even still I'd say 60% isn't insignificant.
Yeah, especially if you need 3 dvd´s instead of just one Blu-Ray
You don't understand . I'm not pushing the 6.4GB is enough. I have never said we should have dvds next gen. I just don't believe that slow and bulky bluray is the right way to go.
And i've said multiple times , you have a 6.4 gig limitation this gen , it was lifted to what 7.2 gigs or something recently ? A 16 gig flash card would offer a 2.5 times increase over the 6.4 gig limitation and a 2.2 times increase on the 7.2 gig .
Flash is also not standing still , each generation of flash will get faster and cheaper. Games don't need to write back to flash so we wont have to care if its 3bits per cell or 2 or 1 . So size and speed at the lowest cost is all thats needed
And at the same time devs can recall games that have stoped selling and reprogram the carts with new data . Also since you can write to flash they can charge gamestop and other used game stores money to unlock carts
I'm tired of load times , I want a better user experiance and on my pc game loading is lightning fast. I want that on my console.
I also rather have a small case to store my flash carts than the huge storage requirements for discs.
Have single layer 25GB blu-ray disc for games. Probably costs less than 20cents to make nowdays in the quantities games are pressed. Current blu-ray optics/drives can read those 4 layer discs trivially and the 4 layer discs are not a burden to games. Assuming you think game sizes are not going to grow significantly and you hit 6x drive(3x performance boost) the performance should be absolutely better than this gen
It depends on what type of drive it is . And while the discs are expensive you have the whole supply chain to think about . A bluray drive uses more power than a flash reader , a bluray drive takes up many many times the space as a flash reader . So now you need a larger power supply , large case , better cooling , larger packaging , more expensive shipping. The bluray drive has multiple moving parts which means more and more ways for it to fail. The flash readers have no moving parts.
On the media side blurays are many times bigger than flash which again means bigger packaging , less units on the shelves , more expensive shipping costs . You then of course have the discs that can scratch and not work. Flash will last much longer.
However look at the pricing and this gen. We are up to 320 gig drives and if we have to start installing all games cause of poor optical perrformance we will need a ton of flash of standard hardrives.
Eastmen, Which do you think is cheaper, have single fast 32GB flash on motherboard for cache+25GB blu-ray delivery or deliver games on fast flash memories(assuming average game size of let's say 10GB)... Yeah, please provide numbers if you think flash delivery is going to be cheaper
And if you make the game binaries same size as current gen or even smaller do remember the 3x speedup on blu-ray drive so all the perf points of flash become quite moot.[/quote]
Look at it this way. If a bluray drive costs $25 and a flash reader costs $1 . Your saving $24 per console. Thats not including other costs you have like large power supply , larger packaging , more expensive shipping , higher fail rate.
With flash vs optical on the storage side you have bluray discs which of course will be cheaper. But they are also bigger so again more expensive packaging and shipping along with taking more shelf space in stores. So now instead of being able to stock 20 copies of a game on flash they might be able to only fit 15 or 10. Then you have the higher fail rate of disc vs flash. Scratches can easily make even a bluray with its special coating fail.
I'd rather a dev use 32GB of nand in raid 0 and get speeds over 100MB/s read then get stuck with slow optical speeds 6x bluray is only 27MB/s load times would actually go up compared to last gen and if games continue to get bigger 32GB of flash inside the console will fill up really quick with games
Mabye but what about prices in 2012/13 when consoles are set to launch. If they sell the games on flash then the flash can grow during the generation. In 2012/13 games might be limited to 16 gigs do to cost , but by 2015 we may see 32 or 64 gigs for the games. Not to mention that flash is allways getting faster.
These 2 arguments are the best so far for Flash, costs and used games in one go, impressive to be honest, lots of loop holes and counter arguments, but good thinking never the less.
Please don´t send them anywhere since i would still prefer big bulky BluRay games without a compromise on size and the chance to get 4K
Will TLC (Triple level cells) help the cause of flash? That ought to give them ~50% more density than MLC for the same space.
The problem is that without a breakthrough in cost/density it isn't likely to be practical. However a console could implement a flash reader cheaply and migrate over in say another 3-4 years if it does become practical.
The problem is that without a breakthrough in cost/density it isn't likely to be practical. However a console could implement a flash reader cheaply and migrate over in say another 3-4 years if it does become practical.
Nope not by far, the idea that cutting cost on a Console by removing an important feature, Blu-Ray playback, is a good idea and at the same time introducing a brand new unproved, untested and limited flash format with limited value on games is imho plain wrong. By cutting Blu-Ray you also introduce the need for new production lines for flash, which is costly instead of just using what is already there.
To take advantage of Flash cards in terms of speed you would require games to be exclusive to just the consoles that use Flash, since PC´s are still Hard drive based.
Let the people who want that feature pay for it (why should I and millions more have to pay >$10 for a feature I will never use?). An addon can give that functionality checkbox without saddling the majority who won't use it with bulky hardware and licensing fees. And only Sony would be 'cutting' blu-ray if they chose that route, MS never had it.
Somewhere between $2-3billion in cost savings is a much bigger deal than the blu-ray checkbox.
But how much would lets say 8GB flash memory cost? Would it be 10$, 20$, or something else? Would there be enough supply of the chips? How long does it take to program single 8GB flash memory compared to printing blu-ray disc?
If we assume reproduction+shipping cost of 1$ for blu-ray and 10$ for 8GB flash and we also assume 30$ for blu-ray hardware it's not very easy for console manufacturer to save money via flash(we could nitpick and release on dvd if size is 8GB but the price difference to blu-ray is neglible). Basically any gamer buying more than 3 games is paying extra for flash based distribution. Or any gamer buying single game that requires 32GB(grhm... there already are 2-3 dvd games in old consoles)
I just don't see it sensible to make a flash distribution only sku. Where I do se sense is a digital download only sku for those people who really don't care about physical media/movies. And I do see this digital only sku being sensible if it includes decent amount of flash memory as default + optional vendor locked HD.
Last edited by a moderator:
Why do distribution flash based? Why not just release digital download only sku where you download games and don't need to pay for cartridge. For example I don't really understand why anyone would buy any non digital games to psp vita... For me the only motivation to have blu-ray on next gen consoles would be movies, for games I would be perfectly happy with digital only. For movies not digital only because for example netflix HD is horribly bad quality compared to blu-ray and even more so compared to the supposedly coming 4k format. With my comcast I would be able to watch 5 full quality 3d blu-ray movies(50GB each) and I would have used all bandwidth I have for the month... I wonder if 4k movies will be stuffed to 50GB or if there is bdxl or somesuch happening for mass reproduction.
As for load times you need to look at game devs and how they build the engines. Being stupid and filling memory and starting game then is not the way to do it... Especially not if you want unique content to each frame.
If you look at for example megatexture the bandwidth needed to stream is surprisingly small as per sebbbi's posts on this board... Also the reads seem to be predictable so seek times on optical media are not a problem. And load times are not either because you try to fill each frame with unique content instead of loading everything up front.
And once you go digital only I would really prefer that fast flash for cache+base sku to alleviate any streaming issues from hdd + give super nice baseline for developers. That would allow one to use el cheapo 4200rpm 2.5" drive for mass storage as the flash takes care of the hard business of random reads.
I'm in favor of full digital on day and date of release, but that's not going to work for a lot of the market. The fact that I can buy a 16GB flash drive for $10 today suggests to me your pricing comparison is a bit high. If the attach rate of consoles is 10 over the life of the product, at an average of $5 a cart the cost would probably be similar (even less) if the total cost of blu-ray is $50 (remember it's not just the cost of the drive, you have extra weight and size for shipping and the fact that optical drives are the most repaired parts). I don't know if that's a price they can do in 2013 or not, but the price for carts could go down considerably over the course of the generation, blu-ray hardware is unlikely to do so (unless you start from a higher price point because you're using a 4x drive or something).
Fair enough and point taken!
Why would we want 8gb carts? More likely we'd be looking at 16-32gb media at $10-20 a pop. By the time flash makes fiscal sense over optical the world will be ready for download only.
Tim Sweeney wants flash cards as well. This interview is from May 2011.
g™: What would be the impact on storage media? Are DVD or Blu-ray big enough for the sorts of games that are coming?
TS: Spinning mechanical media is truly an awful distribution scenario for gaming. Accessing a random piece of data takes up to a quarter second, while NAND-based flash memory access times are measured in nanoseconds. Many of the limitations in current-gen games, from Gears of War to GTA, derive from the hardware’s inability to load random-access data quickly. Given that optical drives are also expensive and don’t cost-reduce over time, I’d expect mechanical media to play no role in future entertainment devices.
www.gamestm.co.uk/.../epics-tim-swe...xt-gen-consoles-and-the-future-of-videogames/
g™: What would be the impact on storage media? Are DVD or Blu-ray big enough for the sorts of games that are coming?
TS: Spinning mechanical media is truly an awful distribution scenario for gaming. Accessing a random piece of data takes up to a quarter second, while NAND-based flash memory access times are measured in nanoseconds. Many of the limitations in current-gen games, from Gears of War to GTA, derive from the hardware’s inability to load random-access data quickly. Given that optical drives are also expensive and don’t cost-reduce over time, I’d expect mechanical media to play no role in future entertainment devices.
www.gamestm.co.uk/.../epics-tim-swe...xt-gen-consoles-and-the-future-of-videogames/
Blazkowicz
Legend
carts would be great on a $50 console.
yes imagine that, someone does a console based on an ARM SoC, similar to the raspberry pi, draws a few watts from a 5 volts or 12 volts input and has composite and hdmi out.
would be nice for the third world and BRIC countries ; allow web browsing, word processing, media playback etc. or even build it optionnally in a commodore 64 fashion.
yes imagine that, someone does a console based on an ARM SoC, similar to the raspberry pi, draws a few watts from a 5 volts or 12 volts input and has composite and hdmi out.
would be nice for the third world and BRIC countries ; allow web browsing, word processing, media playback etc. or even build it optionnally in a commodore 64 fashion.
yes every game will be more than 8GB and the the price will never go down on flash... unpossible.
I'd say that even if the next-gen consoles do have optical media by default they should also have flash card readers as default so that if some dev needs faster streaming/random access they could get that by using the card instead of disk. Or if someone wants to get really fancy, use both simultaneously.
I personally would just prefer no optical and no card and just a big HDD + DD-only. Then again I also have 150Mbit uncapped download speeds for under 30€/month
I personally would just prefer no optical and no card and just a big HDD + DD-only. Then again I also have 150Mbit uncapped download speeds for under 30€/month
That is not a very good argument. "Why should i pay for something i don´t use". First of all, every time you play a Game on the PS3 you use the Blu-Ray drive, as for license costs, some of those goes back to Sony. Blu-Ray included in a PS4 is dirt cheap for the consumer. And secondly, lots of stuff is included in Consoles that people never use but end up paying for anyway, from Software to Hardware. I doubt that Blu-Ray playback is one the least used features.
Advantages of Flash based media, it´s fast, it´s small
Disadvantages, Higher production cost, putting 8-16-32 GB on a card must take time,
The speed might be useless for many games since they are multiplatform and harddrive based anyway. Limited on space and it WILL force developers to cut features/compromise on games because space=money. New investments on producing those carts. Granted in Sonys case the Vita might help them.
If a 12xspeed Blu-Ray drive can be bought today for $50 i am pretty certain that Sony can produce and sell that alot cheaper in a PS3.
