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

[Acert93]

Good thing I peaked at the fastest drives then or else your useless fact would have become quite relevant Are the 12x ones CAV or CLV? I didn't see any reasonably priced 16x drives but my guess is, like DVD, there is a wall and diminishing returns where the noise and lack of significant performance gains become major issues. Where is that with Blu Ray at this point? Is 12x nearing the peak? Are we looking at major affordable advancements in multi-layer simultaneous reading, or other approaches that could offer a big/affordable boom to optical performance? (I don't follow this stuff closely but for an affordable console the mainstream commodity products seem the choice targets in general).

 

[Shifty Geezer]

You are now not even talking about the same situation. You think a high speed BDR drive in 2014, plus licensing, and the associated design and assembly costs compared to an optical-free design is far less than $50?

No. Fair enough about the high-speed drive, but talk of optical drives in general costing substantial amounts for the life of the platform aren't right. It'll cost $50 for the first year, and $30 by the third, and settle at $20, or whatever. For early adopters who buy 20+ games, that's $100 worth added flash cost. On aggregate, flash will cost more for typical use and that cost has to be paid for somehow. Are you passing that cost on to your users (all games on Console A cost $5 more than on Console B) or sucking it up (ouch to the bottom line!)?

Playback fees can always be provided as a download/unlock, so they needn't be factored into the system cost.

Once you commit to optical you are stuck with it;

Someone could introduce a DD SKU later. If you are running off HDD/SSD and optical is just for distribution and install, then that's a possibility.

It isn't just about cutting whatever costs out of the launch but also market movement down the line.

Which has proven the optical drives can be used in very cheap yet profitable hardware, so it's not like including an optical drive dooms your long-term profitability.

I don't think it will happen this gen, but at some point a platform (probably when online infrastructures mature) a platform will cast optical drives off and I think it will be readily apparent the large albatross they are in terms of performance and costs.

Hardware costs, but not media costs. I agree someone may look at ditching optical, although I'd look to Wuu for that first. It'll be targeting a lower spec than PS4/XB3, so would get away with lower storage. If Nintendo go with an optical drive, I think that pretty much guarantees the other two will as the only cheap means to distribute 20+ GB games.

I can definitely see a rather classy card-based console, and I'm not against the notion at all, but I don't think it's an obviously better solution. There could be notable asset quality differences with an optical-based system and the games will likely cost more. The benefit of low load times would be great, but would it be enough to offset game costs? Are your buyers going to be happy to add the cost of a BRD player to their media experience or will the like the added value of the all-in-one system? It's all pros and cons, with people siding on their personal preferences.

 

[-tkf-]

You are now not even talking about the same situation. You think a high speed BDR drive in 2014, plus licensing, and the associated design and assembly costs compared to an optical-free design is far less than $50? This isn't a Walmart special min-spec Blu Ray player but essentially a high performance box with ~200W of chips (and required cooling), a mass storage device (HDD), ports, etc. that you then want to toss in a space hogging optical format. Which, while only retail, the faster drives are not cheap. $50 may be high but iSupplies folks often indicated how much people under-balled these things. Call it $40 or $35, whatever, but this is not trying to push a cheap-o commodity drive like the 360/Wii had at launch; for reference compare how the Xbox just 4 years earlier had a *fee* to unlock DVD playback due to licensing. That situation, in 2001, is more similar to 2014 with Blu Ray than 2005 with the Xbox 360.

We may just not see eye to eye above, but in terms of long term platform reduction the HDD and the Optical Drive merit special consideration as they consume space and undergo the least aggressive cost reductions. Those are big hurdles for companies who may fancy their console as a cheap set top box down the line. Once you commit to optical you are stuck with it; once you commit to mass storage you are stuck with it (less of a problem now with cheap onboard flash solutions).

License costs is a pretty loose term, Sony is one of those that owns licenses on Blu-Ray so how much do they really have to pay? In regards to the drive itself, we have seen optical designs based on proprietary drives in cheap systems before. I really doubt that drive cost and cooling is such a big issue in the next generation. And about the size thing, the N64 was just as big as a PS1, it could have been smaller? but for some reason that wasn´t a major issue. Actually when i look at some of the packaging on things i buy i am really not convinced that size has that much of an impact, my new PS3 had a bunch of manuals that maybe weigh as much as new optical drive, and i only need one of them. The same goes for shelf space, my local gamestop does not have a problem with shelf space, they actually have very little on the shelfs, mostly new games, they don´t stock older titles, they are all on the used games shelf that is 3-4 times as big as the new games shelf

And about losing the Optical Drive... the PSPGO does not agree.. if they really want to make a topbox with the same games it can be done, if anyone actually believes that a PS4 or 720 will be turned into to a topset box in the future.

To clarify, are your suggesting taking the already generally poor load time issues, tossing in the PS3 installation load-time experience (which many loath as you know), compounded it by larger memory pools and larger games for next gen, and deposited that as a convincing argument. You don't see why that would be a problem on consoles

The HDD limiting scenario makes sense if you first assume the optical drive. Flip the scenario with some sort of fast solid mass storage I am not sure that works anymore. I am not saying it isn't a solution, or even one that will be taken (I think it will), but you are turning a console into a PC at that point. Which doesn't address one of the major design issues consoles are facing. Basically it is throwing up of hands for the instant-gaming / ease of use approach.

The biggest problem with those installs is imho the slow install time, which i just doesn´t understand have to be so long. There must be something fundamental wrong with the way those installs work. But on paper even a semi slow BR-Drive should be able to copy 20GB unto a harddrive in 15 minutes. That shouldn´t be a hard problem to fix, if they go that route.

The HDD limiting scenario makes sense if you first assume the optical drive. Flip the scenario with some sort of fast solid mass storage I am not sure that works anymore. I am not saying it isn't a solution, or even one that will be taken (I think it will), but you are turning a console into a PC at that point. Which doesn't address one of the major design issues consoles are facing. Basically it is throwing up of hands for the instant-gaming / ease of use approach.

How do you proposed a Multi platform game should take advantage of Flash on consoles? The PC version will still have to rely on a slow harddrive.

 

[jonabbey]

Vita is an interesting exemplar for this discussion, as it is being criticized for long load times with the rather slow flash that Sony is using for their memory and game carts.

It seems like a lot of the ills of an optical disc could be ameliorated by adding a good deal of slower RAM for dynamic caching, or a relatively modest amount of high spec onboard SSD for more durable disc caching.

Do that and take the hdd out, and sell it as an external add-on like MS did this generation and you might get a slightly smaller case. Use the ram or flash to cache the optical disc and you might be able to significantly lower the duty cycle on the optical disc drive as well.

Buh.. I'm just repeating trivial observations, I know.

Let me at let ask a new queston.. whatever happened to ROM, anyway?

 

[Squilliam]

What are the cons of optical distribution?

1. 20W of console power and greater difficulties in cooling. If the console is coming in at 120W-150W post PSU, 20W represents about 13-18% of the total power budget which could be spent on either making the system cooling quieter or making the overall system faster within the same budget.

2. It represents an additional cost of $20-40 depending on specs of drive and whether or not media playback is enabled. Remember Blu Ray playback costs ~$9.50 on top of the physical drive costs. They have to pay this cost no matter whether someone buys very few optical disc games because they rely on digital distribution and streaming or if they buy a lot of games.

3. It requires extra hardware just to mitigate the performance limitations and this adds to the total size, cost and power budget. You'd need extra RAM, perhaps a HDD etc to make up for the shortfall in latency and streaming speed.

4. It inflates the size of games. Developers releasing 6-15GB games would be a lot more practical to distribute electronically than 12-50GB titles and to receive these titles on the console for storage you'd also need to use a much larger HDD, say 500GB instead of say 180-250GB which is an additional cost for any HDD inclusive SKU and prevents the use of solid state memory for a SKU which has a HDD.

5. It gives an inferior user experience because of the noise of the spinning disc and the time it takes to stream or download any title. Many people resort to installing games on the HDD in order to improve streaming speed and reduce noise, a cartridge gives an even better use experience than this without the wait.

6. Publishers are concerned about used titles and the used game market. They couldn't monetize used games and rentals in nearly the same way with optical discs given the fact that they're all mass produced and stamped the same.

7. You gain nothing in a console from taking advantage of the power of the internet, streaming etc by including an optical drive.

8. People just might not think it's nearly as cool.

 

[AlphaWolf]

This is just plain unrealistic. An optical drive can be included in a proftable sub $100 console.

The cost of the ps2 is probably half optical drive at this point, the only console example of a blu-ray is selling at $249, in its sixth year and I dare say it will never hit $100.

 

[Blazkowicz]

2. $9.50? talk about being greedy . that must be why the WiiU uses a blu ray drive without blu ray playback.

4. a clever dev could cut a lot of the redundancy built into an optical based game, down to zero if you're downloading to a flash drive.
but it's a good point.

500GB hard drive, an issue? it's the capacity of current single platter 2.5" drives.
a 250GB hard drive would only costs the same to build (esp. for the 7 years of product life), and be a bit slower.
by 2014 you include include a drive bigger than that.

7. it would be interesting to know the number of people who never connect their console to the internet, even though they may have broadband at home.

 

[Squilliam]

2. $9.50? talk about being greedy . that must be why the WiiU uses a blu ray drive without blu ray playback.

Yup! That is also why the Wii doesn't have DVD playback.

4. a clever dev could cut a lot of the redundancy built into an optical based game, down to zero if you're downloading to a flash drive.
but it's a good point.

It is more than that, it is also about designing with the expectation of up to 50GB of space for instance when even half of that is impractical for direct download.

500GB hard drive, an issue? it's the capacity of current single platter 2.5" drives.
a 250GB hard drive would only costs the same to build (esp. for the 7 years of product life), and be a bit slower.
by 2014 you include include a drive bigger than that.

We'd probably be close to price parity between an SSD and a smaller HDD for consoles by that time. However that would be out of the question if game sizes grew too large.

7. it would be interesting to know the number of people who never connect their console to the internet, even though they may have broadband at home.

It'd be a decent quantity. I think it'd be about 1/3rd at this point from Live statistics I recall.

 

[-tkf-]

1. 20W of console power and greater difficulties in cooling. If the console is coming in at 120W-150W post PSU, 20W represents about 13-18% of the total power budget which could be spent on either making the system cooling quieter or making the overall system faster within the same budget.

Why should it require more than a USB drive?

2. It represents an additional cost of $20-40 depending on specs of drive and whether or not media playback is enabled. Remember Blu Ray playback costs ~$9.50 on top of the physical drive costs. They have to pay this cost no matter whether someone buys very few optical disc games because they rely on digital distribution and streaming or if they buy a lot of games.

Remember Sony owns some of the licenses, so for them it should be cheaper. In any case, $10 is a very cheap Blu-Ray player, as Shifty said, it can be a dlc license.

3. It requires extra hardware just to mitigate the performance limitations and this adds to the total size, cost and power budget. You'd need extra RAM, perhaps a HDD etc to make up for the shortfall in latency and streaming speed.

You just need a harddrive, which is already included so that the content creators can earn money on DLC and Sony/Microsoft can sell you music and movies.

4. It inflates the size of games. Developers releasing 6-15GB games would be a lot more practical to distribute electronically than 12-50GB titles and to receive these titles on the console for storage you'd also need to use a much larger HDD, say 500GB instead of say 180-250GB which is an additional cost for any HDD inclusive SKU and prevents the use of solid state memory for a SKU which has a HDD.

It removes any reason to compromise like we see today, and since a DL Blu-Ray will still cost more, there is a semi soft limit at 25GB. Harddrive prices for a 250 vs 500GB? That is going to be a small difference, but even a 250GB drive with the proposed attach rate of 10 games over a console liftetime should still be enough.

But funny, installing from an optical drive is slow, but download 10+ gigs from the internet is not a problem

5. It gives an inferior user experience because of the noise of the spinning disc and the time it takes to stream or download any title. Many people resort to installing games on the HDD in order to improve streaming speed and reduce noise, a cartridge gives an even better use experience than this without the wait.

Yep, 360 sales were really slowed down by the most noisy console ever created Games will most likely rely heavily on Harddrives in any case.. so..

6. Publishers are concerned about used titles and the used game market. They couldn't monetize used games and rentals in nearly the same way with optical discs given the fact that they're all mass produced and stamped the same.

Online passes take the brunt out of this, and imho, if they don´t try and sustain the lifetime of their product i want to be able to sell my games to others.

7. You gain nothing in a console from taking advantage of the power of the internet, streaming etc by including an optical drive.

??

 

[AlNom]

Why should it require more than a USB drive?

Motors suck up a lot of power.

 

[-tkf-]

Motors suck up a lot of power.

My point is that at work we got a USB Blu-Ray-Burner, it reads and burns at 6x speed, only one USB cable is needed. So USB power is enough..

 

[Acert93]

Remember Sony owns some of the licenses

There are 2 other current console manufacturers (plus supposedly companies like Apple, Valve, Google in the wind). I think everyone would agree that after the aggressive moves Sony made to get Blu Ray into the PS3 at nearly any cost the PS4 will have a Blu Ray player. But from the general perspective of the merits/lack of merits of forgoing an optical drive (which next gen really means Blu Ray for most pragmatic purposes) the home-town discount only really applies to Sony. How does Sony owning licenses help Nintendo? Microsoft? Valve? For those companies the above merit is a demerit.

 

[AlNom]

My point is that at work we got a USB Blu-Ray-Burner, it reads and burns at 6x speed, only one USB cable is needed. So USB power is enough..

Between half-height and slim drives, there are trade-offs related to spin-up time, access times, max rpm, heat, failure rate, cache size, cost etc.

Don't think you'll find a 12x BD external slim...

 

[Squilliam]

Why should it require more than a USB drive?

An external USB drive would require 500ma *5V = 2.5W *2 = 5W. However that'd be different again from a full speed drive running at 8* internal as it'd be configured differently. An internal drive would use a little over 10W I was wrong by a factor of two.

You just need a harddrive, which is already included so that the content creators can earn money on DLC and Sony/Microsoft can sell you music and movies.
It removes any reason to compromise like we see today, and since a DL Blu-Ray will still cost more, there is a semi soft limit at 25GB. Harddrive prices for a 250 vs 500GB? That is going to be a small difference, but even a 250GB drive with the proposed attach rate of 10 games over a console liftetime should still be enough.

You don't need a HDD for content streamed over the internet, music and movies can be stored on an external server ala Ultraviolet or similar. It is only games which need the HDD space whether for installs or downloads. A console which has both a mechanical HDD and ODD likely has a minimum floor price added of $100 which certainly would make it difficult to cut the price of the console in the future. You probably won't make back the cost of the HDD on downloads either.

??

You can't use an optical disc to download anything from the internet. You also don't need a HDD to stream content either. If the future is more towards the internet and high speed broadband, why include features which only add cost and add little value towards that end?

 

[Npl]

1. 20W of console power and greater difficulties in cooling. If the console is coming in at 120W-150W post PSU, 20W represents about 13-18% of the total power budget which could be spent on either making the system cooling quieter or making the overall system faster within the same budget.

KK.

2. It represents an additional cost of $20-40 depending on specs of drive and whether or not media playback is enabled. Remember Blu Ray playback costs ~$9.50 on top of the physical drive costs. They have to pay this cost no matter whether someone buys very few optical disc games because they rely on digital distribution and streaming or if they buy a lot of games.

There could be an option to purchase a license, similar like wma and flash has to be activated. Do these the costs include H264/AAC/DTS licenses - if yes then part of this will be necessary for a "streamer" too (unless you really want to go the way of a philosophically "free" VP8/Vorbis/HTML5 only device)

3. It requires extra hardware just to mitigate the performance limitations and this adds to the total size, cost and power budget. You'd need extra RAM, perhaps a HDD etc to make up for the shortfall in latency and streaming speed.

Extra RAM would be useful for way more than just buffering, and given that next-gen will have atleast an option for HDD, why not just add a (slow&cheap) flash-based HDD in your cheapest model?
its not like you are limited to mechanical drives, so your "HDDs wont get cheaper" argument wont hold.

4. It inflates the size of games. Developers releasing 6-15GB games would be a lot more practical to distribute electronically than 12-50GB titles and to receive these titles on the console for storage you'd also need to use a much larger HDD, say 500GB instead of say 180-250GB which is an additional cost for any HDD inclusive SKU and prevents the use of solid state memory for a SKU which has a HDD.

huh, you say that hitting devs with size restrictions is a good thing? You can put as much or little on a disc, small games stay small games.
Having to work your ass off to fit the game on a cartridge certainly cant be better than having to work around drive speed limits - there are a few BD games like Uncharted that manage this nicely.
Also some people like me greatly appreciate having all languages on one disc, and space for extras - something thats not given on cartridges as that would likely be the first thing to be cut away.

5. It gives an inferior user experience because of the noise of the spinning disc and the time it takes to stream or download any title. Many people resort to installing games on the HDD in order to improve streaming speed and reduce noise, a cartridge gives an even better use experience than this without the wait.

I really doubt we will see cheap and fast
cartridges in the near future.

6. Publishers are concerned about used titles and the used game market. They couldn't monetize used games and rentals in nearly the same way with optical discs given the fact that they're all mass produced and stamped the same.

Already worked around with things like Online pass - of course not as flexible as having writeable memory.

7. You gain nothing in a console from taking advantage of the power of the internet, streaming etc by including an optical drive.

the power of the internet??? man Im happy I dont have to rely on the net and services running. Sounds like you`d be served right with a tabled and onlive, I certainly aint.

8. People just might not think it's nearly as cool.

What? show me one person who played around with flashcards the way he gazed at CDs at one point in his life. :smile:

and related to point 6: flash has the problem of being writeable, and so far every cartridge-system got some hardware that electrically emulated the cartridges - with rather cheap electronic components. Making 1:1 copies of optical disc still requires hugely expensive factories.
So either you have to add some sophisticated locks and cryptography (in every cartridge) to deny someone simply flashing the newest game over a old cartridge, reseting usercount (or whatever you use to disallow used sales) - adding to cost, possibly reducing performance.
Or you end up with quite alot more lost sales than the used market is responsible for.
(or even both if your security measures get broken)

 

[-tkf-]

An external USB drive would require 500ma *5V = 2.5W *2 = 5W. However that'd be different again from a full speed drive running at 8* internal as it'd be configured differently. An internal drive would use a little over 10W I was wrong by a factor of two.

You don't need a HDD for content streamed over the internet, music and movies can be stored on an external server ala Ultraviolet or similar. It is only games which need the HDD space whether for installs or downloads. A console which has both a mechanical HDD and ODD likely has a minimum floor price added of $100 which certainly would make it difficult to cut the price of the console in the future. You probably won't make back the cost of the HDD on downloads either.

You can't use an optical disc to download anything from the internet. You also don't need a HDD to stream content either. If the future is more towards the internet and high speed broadband, why include features which only add cost and add little value towards that end?

Yep, those 10 Watt was the same i could find for a LG 12xspeed drive, i just don´t see any problem with that. The internet is not the solution to all storage problems, that is pretty much a fact since isp´s started to introduce transfer limits. And without a harddrive there is no basket to put all your internet shoppings in, so that is a no go imho. That is not adding cost, that is providing a platform where you can milk money from the customers.

 

[-tkf-]

From another thread:

Loading time:
HDD vs Blu-Ray
http://youtu.be/V7alhJW80Iw

DVD vs Blu-Ray (with HD-Cache i guess)
http://youtu.be/IZ5LKiaK1vc

 

[hoho]

One "tiny" thing to note is that the DVD in XB was nearly as fast as they get while BD in PS3 is several times slower than it could be.

 

[Blazkowicz]

wild idea : a 7200 rpm single platter hard drive would be the standard.

the expense would be somewhat justified by the lower latency when streaming. huge enough for games, and an order of magnitude more throughput than the 20GB hard drives of early last gen.

 

[Acert93]

Blazkowicz, any handy links comparing performance (read, write, access, etc) between 5400, 7200, and 10000rpm 2.5" drives with various cache (8MB, 16MB, etc) and platter configurations?