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

[-tkf-]

In some arenas procedural content(evolved), has matched or surpassed human achievement at times. Do not think that the limitations of the past hold for the future.

LINK!

The thousand year does not matter, the fact that after a decade the disk you bougth might be useless and unreadable does matter, at least to me. At minimum we must guarantee that we're not left with a collection of coaster disks we've to trade back to the corporations for access to the content we paid and bought.

I have Video Tapes that are older than my current DVD collection, they are getting crispy and may not look like they used to do, but the advantage of physical media is being able to make a Copy, when i get around to Copy my hundres of DVD´s onto a harddrive i will have enough space for them, lucky for us the same can be said of Blu-Ray.

 

[steampoweredgod]

I have Video Tapes that are older than my current DVD collection, they are getting crispy and may not look like they used to do, but the advantage of physical media is being able to make a Copy, when i get around to Copy my hundres of DVD´s onto a harddrive i will have enough space for them, lucky for us the same can be said of Blu-Ray.

DRM might prove a hurdle to that with regards to consoles, though I'm not up to date on blu-ray drm hacking.

LINK

The fascinating thing about the antenna story is that no one had any idea of just what a "better antenna" would look like. In fact, they wound up with something that looks like a paper clip bent into triangles. Let me repeat the key thing here: a bunch of engineers wanted a better antenna. They had no idea what that better antenna would look like. But by throwing it into an evolutionary algorithm, they produced an antenna better than anything designed by a human being.-link

Her music, however, is something else again: completely original and hauntingly beautiful. Even a classical purist might have trouble determining whether a human being or an AI program created it....

Emmy, Cope’s earlier AI system, was able to take a musical style — say, classical heavyweights such as Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart — and develop scores imitating them that classical music scholars could not distinguish from the originals.-link

 

[eastmen]

That's a fair argument, but far from conclusive. If the only purpose in optical in Wuu is BC, and flash is supposed to be better in every other way, why not chuck in a dirt cheap DVD drive instead of a more expensive BRD derivative and have a card port for Wuu games? Wuu hasn't even got an HDD for caching, and likely won't feature an SSD either, so performance data access from optical won't be there. What'll they have? Optical and local flash storage? They consider that more economical than supporting cards? Yep. So why not the same for MS and Sony who will likely be needing more storage than Wuu?

Nintendo has allways kept costs down. Look at the 512 megs of space in the wii vs a larger pool or a hardrive. Nintendo will only go one of the other and try and sell the system for as high as they can with as low of a bom as they can.


Sony has a large stake in bluray so it doesn't make sense for them to leave it out of the system .


MS is the one that is able to move. They have a robust dd store , they have been steadly increasing game size on the store and already have xbox 360 games up there. THe majority of xbox 360 games are 6.4 gigs . So downloads are small and cheap. SO BC wouldn't be a problem and MS can sell the older games on the store. Just look at what sony is doing with the vita

At the same time MS doesn't have any intrest in bluray , they don't make money off more discs selling. So they don't have anything to loose going flash and they can actually gain alot like removing the used market and having high performing storage.

 

[Brad Grenz]

Yeah, nothing to lose by going flash except an enormous amount of money. Unless they are prepared to simply eat the production cost difference for every publisher (which would add up to billions of dollars over the course of the life cycle) why wouldn't EA and Activision just walk, effectively "Dreamcasting" the platform? It would leave the 720 DOA. Gamers will just follow Madden and Call of Duty to PS4 or Wii U, so it's not like publishers stand to lose anything.

 

[-tkf-]

Nintendo has allways kept costs down. Look at the 512 megs of space in the wii vs a larger pool or a hardrive. Nintendo will only go one of the other and try and sell the system for as high as they can with as low of a bom as they can.


Sony has a large stake in bluray so it doesn't make sense for them to leave it out of the system .


MS is the one that is able to move. They have a robust dd store , they have been steadly increasing game size on the store and already have xbox 360 games up there. THe majority of xbox 360 games are 6.4 gigs . So downloads are small and cheap. SO BC wouldn't be a problem and MS can sell the older games on the store. Just look at what sony is doing with the vita

At the same time MS doesn't have any intrest in bluray , they don't make money off more discs selling. So they don't have anything to loose going flash and they can actually gain alot like removing the used market and having high performing storage.

So you agree that Nintendo considers 25GB required for next gen games, since they didn´t choose a DVD drive. As for DD, all 3 consoles have a store and in the case of the PS3 size doesn´t matter, you can buy BF3 afaik.

As for costs, in the case of Carts/Flash, you have to remember that there is several issues that makes them expensive, besides the raw cost for the chips, logic, there is the production line, and the production time. With Flash you have a limited production capacity, hot games may actually sell out, and because it´s expensive to produce to many (games that flop) great care has to be taken when games are launched. Those that miss the projected sales and end up with 100.000s of carts will loose a lot of money.

Besides removing used games is a clear risk, if Nintendo and Sony doesn´t do the same Microsoft will have the expensive platform with games that you can´t sell.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Sony has a large stake in bluray so it doesn't make sense for them to leave it out of the system .

That makes little sense. If using BRD for games is going to gimp the system as much as you feel, then supporting it doesn't serve them particularly well. The format is already established. Anyone who cares about playing BluRays who hasn't got a BluRay player by the time they'd buy a PS4 can get one for £50 or whatever it'll be, and Sony don't profit from printing their own game discs. In fact printing game discs when they could be getting paid to print films for other people would be a loss for their production arm. Alternatively, even Sony could go with two IO devices. If flash cards are that much better, Sony could include optical for media playing and maybe even BC, and add a cheap card slot for PS4 games. If that'd save them the cost of embedded flash/SSD, etc. needed to support the optical, which is too slow for loading directly, why not go that route?

Regards Nintendo, I'd say they always go with the most profitable hardware, not the cheapest. If using cards would result in more money, they'd do it. The fact they aren't means going with cards costs more than going with discs - the quintessential cost argument that is also applicable to MS. Going with cards will cost more in the long run.

 

[TheWretched]

I think Sonys "it only does everything" campaign will continue with PS4, hence it'll probably have BDROM either way. And if it's too slow for dynamic loads, it'll also have a secondary storage for installation, too, as it's already the case on PS3.

 

[Squilliam]

What about using cartridges as an option to 'print on demand' legacy Wii and Xbox 360 games? You would only need a maximum of 8GB and could therefore use standardized 8GB carts and it shouldn't be too expensive to fit a basic cart reader in the console to support this option. Then if the cartridges take off as a sales option they could extend it to current generations or drop it entirely, is the risk mitigated enough this way?

 

[eastmen]

So you agree that Nintendo considers 25GB required for next gen games, since they didn´t choose a DVD drive. As for DD, all 3 consoles have a store and in the case of the PS3 size doesn´t matter, you can buy BF3 afaik.

As for costs, in the case of Carts/Flash, you have to remember that there is several issues that makes them expensive, besides the raw cost for the chips, logic, there is the production line, and the production time. With Flash you have a limited production capacity, hot games may actually sell out, and because it´s expensive to produce to many (games that flop) great care has to be taken when games are launched. Those that miss the projected sales and end up with 100.000s of carts will loose a lot of money.

Besides removing used games is a clear risk, if Nintendo and Sony doesn´t do the same Microsoft will have the expensive platform with games that you can´t sell.

Last I check a dvd was 8.4 gigs and a bluray is 25 gigs. There is a lot of storage between those to sizes. Did nintendo feel 10 gigs was enough , 15 gigs ? 20 gigs ?


Does nintendo feel that 25 gigs while not needed in 2012 might be needed in 2018 ?

Whats the answer , do you know ? Flash will continue to grow in size while costs go down so while we may start at 8-16 gigs of flash for most games in 2013 by 2015 we may be up to 32 gigs which is clearly more than 25 gigs and by 2017 we could be up to 64 gigs which is double 25 gigs.

See how nice and easy that works out ?

As for used games , flash has the ability to be written to so at the very least MS can control the costs of the used market , which sony and nintendo wont be able to do without using some type of paper code system

 

[eastmen]

That makes little sense. If using BRD for games is going to gimp the system as much as you feel, then supporting it doesn't serve them particularly well. The format is already established. Anyone who cares about playing BluRays who hasn't got a BluRay player by the time they'd buy a PS4 can get one for £50 or whatever it'll be, and Sony don't profit from printing their own game discs. In fact printing game discs when they could be getting paid to print films for other people would be a loss for their production arm. Alternatively, even Sony could go with two IO devices. If flash cards are that much better, Sony could include optical for media playing and maybe even BC, and add a cheap card slot for PS4 games. If that'd save them the cost of embedded flash/SSD, etc. needed to support the optical, which is too slow for loading directly, why not go that route?

Regards Nintendo, I'd say they always go with the most profitable hardware, not the cheapest. If using cards would result in more money, they'd do it. The fact they aren't means going with cards costs more than going with discs - the quintessential cost argument that is also applicable to MS. Going with cards will cost more in the long run.

Sony does little that makes sense . Should I list those that make little sense with the Vita ?

Huge ass charger thats about the size of the vita itself

Memory card with insane prices 32 gigs = $100 thus inflating the price of said console.

Ditching of a BC program in multiple countrys .

Having 2 diffrent programs to get games onto your vita .


Those are just some of the insane things sony has done with the vita that i've encountered in 2 days of owning it.

Its in sony's best intrest to get more people using bluray and its in sony's intrest to make devs pay them for bluray discs to be pressed. It keeps their plants production lines full .

Sony has many reasons to stay with bluray + bandaids vs moving to a new format.

 

[-tkf-]

Sony does little that makes sense . Should I list those that make little sense with the Vita ?

Huge ass charger thats about the size of the vita itself

Memory card with insane prices 32 gigs = $100 thus inflating the price of said console.

Ditching of a BC program in multiple countrys .

Having 2 diffrent programs to get games onto your vita .

Those are just some of the insane things sony has done with the vita that i've encountered in 2 days of owning it.

Its in sony's best intrest to get more people using bluray and its in sony's intrest to make devs pay them for bluray discs to be pressed. It keeps their plants production lines full .

Sony has many reasons to stay with bluray + bandaids vs moving to a new format.

Microsoft used the "insane" tactics to perfection with the 360, so any argument there is against the high prices for addons can be said about the 360, but afaik that wasn´t really the case was it?

And i think you should provide us with some data on your "plant" theory, who knows you may have a point but until then it´s just non argument.

 

[-tkf-]

Last I check a dvd was 8.4 gigs and a bluray is 25 gigs. There is a lot of storage between those to sizes. Did nintendo feel 10 gigs was enough , 15 gigs ? 20 gigs ?


Does nintendo feel that 25 gigs while not needed in 2012 might be needed in 2018 ?

Whats the answer , do you know ? Flash will continue to grow in size while costs go down so while we may start at 8-16 gigs of flash for most games in 2013 by 2015 we may be up to 32 gigs which is clearly more than 25 gigs and by 2017 we could be up to 64 gigs which is double 25 gigs.

See how nice and easy that works out ?

As for used games , flash has the ability to be written to so at the very least MS can control the costs of the used market , which sony and nintendo wont be able to do without using some type of paper code system

I think Nintendo knows a hell of a lot more about this than any of us on this board, and they clearly did the math and ended up with a bluray drive. And i can understand them, BF4 isn´t going to be out in 2020, it´s a 2013 game and by then they will need 15-20GB for that game, putting it on flash would make it , how was your math at least $10-$15 more than on a disc. And yes, by 2020 i think they wish they had a DL drive.. which they actually may have

You still haven´t addressed all the counterpoints to flash, are you ignoring them on purpose?

 

[eastmen]

Microsoft used the "insane" tactics to perfection with the 360, so any argument there is against the high prices for addons can be said about the 360, but afaik that wasn´t really the case was it?

And i think you should provide us with some data on your "plant" theory, who knows you may have a point but until then it´s just non argument.

You can google for yourself that at the start of the generation Sony forced all developers to release games on bluray , infact its still going on , even if a game can fit on a dvd it has to be released on bluray. This was for sony to keep its factory lines full .

MS did alot of silly stuff , going to flash wouldn't be silly . It would be a smart way foward

I think Nintendo knows a hell of a lot more about this than any of us on this board, and they clearly did the math and ended up with a bluray drive. And i can understand them, BF4 isn´t going to be out in 2020, it´s a 2013 game and by then they will need 15-20GB for that game, putting it on flash would make it , how was your math at least $10-$15 more than on a disc. And yes, by 2020 i think they wish they had a DL drive.. which they actually may have

You still haven´t addressed all the counterpoints to flash, are you ignoring them on purpose?

Its not my math , i believe MS / Sony would be able to do 16 gigs for $10 or under by 2013.

What are the counter points to flash , all i keep hearing is that its more expensive ?

But as I've said multiple times the cost can be mitigated in multiple ways .

1) imprinting to recoup lost money from used sales

2) Increasing the game price for the consumer

3) investing savings from the console cost to subsidise the initial flash requirements

4) reusing the flash by culling the used market. No more 50 cent copies of madden 2013.

Flash frees up alot of money tied into the console itself and the burden of its price per unit can be shared between new game buyers , publishers , and the used market.

 

[-tkf-]

You can google for yourself that at the start of the generation Sony forced all developers to release games on bluray , infact its still going on , even if a game can fit on a dvd it has to be released on bluray. This was for sony to keep its factory lines full .

MS did alot of silly stuff , going to flash wouldn't be silly . It would be a smart way foward

Its not my math , i believe MS / Sony would be able to do 16 gigs for $10 or under by 2013.

What are the counter points to flash , all i keep hearing is that its more expensive ?

But as I've said multiple times the cost can be mitigated in multiple ways .

1) imprinting to recoup lost money from used sales

2) Increasing the game price for the consumer

3) investing savings from the console cost to subsidise the initial flash requirements

4) reusing the flash by culling the used market. No more 50 cent copies of madden 2013.

Flash frees up alot of money tied into the console itself and the burden of its price per unit can be shared between new game buyers , publishers , and the used market.

Find the links yourself, it´s your claim, unless you provide them i don´t believe it. And i am really curious how you would expect Sony to have a dual DRM system, one for DVD and Blu-Ray. But i guess i can google that as well?

Flash isn´t faster, unless you propose that the Carts should be based on Fast Nand and Raid 0 controllers? Then i think you can take you fantasy $10 dollars and add a bit more.

And even if we believe that the cost is only $10 for 16GB by 2013, without taking into account the 2 billion you think a production line would cost and besides the actual hardware there is also the ass slow production compared to stamping discs. It´s still $9 more than a Blu-Ray, with 3 games the customer would already have paid for a Blu-Ray drive, and with the 4th game he would have enabled Blu-Ray playback. And games of today is 16GB they wont shrink, unless forced to.

Flash will compromise game quality, there i said it, again! As a publisher you will have a choice, more content or more costs, at some point there is a break point. And it will always be to the publishers advantage. Rage was compromised because of the DVD size, imagine Rage on a console that is flash based.

Flash is a greater financial risk, print 10 million games on BluRay, sell 9.500.000 lose 500.000 dollars in production cost. With flash it would be 4 and half million dollars at your proposed size, bigger games, bigger risks.

Killing used games, bad idea unless everyone does it, which Nintendo apparently wont. That makes you the console that has the most expensive games that you can´t swap for new games.

A console without Blu-Ray might be cheaper, but would the perceived extra value of a Blu-Ray playback level that out? I say in general it would, if you have 2 consoles on a shelf, one cheaper with expensive games and one that may cost more but adds bluray and cheap games you have a hard sale no matter how you cut it. Blu-Ray is not like DVD something everybody have in every room, and even if they did most would have no problem with scraping the old and slow player for a new and quick one.

 

[Brad Grenz]

You can google for yourself that at the start of the generation Sony forced all developers to release games on bluray , infact its still going on , even if a game can fit on a dvd it has to be released on bluray. This was for sony to keep its factory lines full .

Sooo, it costs 30 cents more? Those monsters! Has been a pretty effective anti-piracy measure as well...

Its not my math , i believe MS / Sony would be able to do 16 gigs for $10 or under by 2013.

So, only 20 times what it costs for a bluray, instead of 30?

1) imprinting to recoup lost money from used sales

Huge competitive disadvantage against any platform that does not disable used sales.

2) Increasing the game price for the consumer

Huge competitive disadvantage against any platform that does not increse new game prices.

3) investing savings from the console cost to subsidise the initial flash requirements

Inflection point occurs after only the first 3 games or so. Every game after that loses money compared to optical.

4) reusing the flash by culling the used market. No more 50 cent copies of madden 2013.

Probably more expensive than just making new carts.

Flash frees up alot of money tied into the console itself and the burden of its price per unit can be shared between new game buyers , publishers , and the used market.

Eating $30 up front makes sense when the other option is eating $10 for every piece of software in perpetuity. There is no way to make the math work. The options are catastrophic failure in the market, losing more money than you're making by subsidizing the cost burden or simply using optical like everyone else.

 

[eastmen]

Find the links yourself, it´s your claim, unless you provide them i don´t believe it. And i am really curious how you would expect Sony to have a dual DRM system, one for DVD and Blu-Ray. But i guess i can google that as well?

It has been discussed on here , sorry if i don't feel like searching for stuff that happened in 2006. Also having two forms of DRM doesn't seem to bother Sony. The playstation 2 had games released on both cd and dvd and the ps3 is able to play ps2 dvds just fine.

Flash isn´t faster, unless you propose that the Carts should be based on Fast Nand and Raid 0 controllers? Then i think you can take you fantasy $10 dollars and add a bit more.

Flash is of course faster. I'm not sure what crazy world you live in but Flash has faster transfers and seek times.

There are already SD cards doing 30MB/s

reads and USB 3.0 flash drives doing 200MB/s reads. The flash in these devices are already months old and there are already faster , smaller and cheaper nand chips out there.

And even if we believe that the cost is only $10 for 16GB by 2013, without taking into account the 2 billion you think a production line would cost and besides the actual hardware there is also the ass slow production compared to stamping discs. It´s still $9 more than a Blu-Ray, with 3 games the customer would already have paid for a Blu-Ray drive, and with the 4th game he would have enabled Blu-Ray playback. And games of today is 16GB they wont shrink, unless forced to.

I can go and buy a 16GB flash drive
http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extre...YU/ref=sr_1_17?ie=UTF8&qid=1332650750&sr=8-17

And even with amazon taking a cut , Sandisk taking a cut and the company that produced the nand taking a cut , i can get it for as low as $22 . This SD card is already a year old and is does not indicated the speed improvements in the new 2x nm nand . I'd wager you can do 16GB of this quality nand for less than $10 bucks right now.

Keep in mind thats a 45MB/s transfer rate on the card. That would require a 10x bluray drive with a constant read across the entire disc to perform the same. That is 2011 flash speeds , not 2013 when the next gen consoles hit.

Flash will compromise game quality, there i said it, again! As a publisher you will have a choice, more content or more costs, at some point there is a break point. And it will always be to the publishers advantage. Rage was compromised because of the DVD size, imagine Rage on a console that is flash based.

Rage suffered many problems on the pc , a platform that has no compromises , one of them was the image quality. Mega textures is just not a good way to go.

Aside from that tessellation is supposed to help ease the need numerous lod models

Flash is a greater financial risk, print 10 million games on BluRay, sell 9.500.000 lose 500.000 dollars in production cost. With flash it would be 4 and half million dollars at your proposed size, bigger games, bigger risks.

Produce 50m systems with an optical drive and pay at least 2,500,000,000 more in system costs .

Killing used games, bad idea unless everyone does it, which Nintendo apparently wont. That makes you the console that has the most expensive games that you can´t swap for new games.

You don't have to phase it out completely , at least not in the first go around , but you can give the publishers / developers more ways to control it . Flash has the ability to be writen too multiple times. Have a copy of Gears of war 4 and want to trade it in ? Put it in your console and select to unlock it from your xbox for $10 and the nyo ucan sell it on amazon or trade it in or give it to a friend. Now MS and the dev/publisher get a $10 cut of the used game market. Your friend wants to borrow it ? have a special rental option where for $2 or $4 you can unlock it from your console for X amount of days for the friend to play it .

A console without Blu-Ray might be cheaper, but would the perceived extra value of a Blu-Ray playback level that out? I say in general it would, if you have 2 consoles on a shelf, one cheaper with expensive games and one that may cost more but adds bluray and cheap games you have a hard sale no matter how you cut it. Blu-Ray is not like DVD something everybody have in every room, and even if they did most would have no problem with scraping the old and slow player for a new and quick one.

In the united states it doesn't seem like Blu-ray is moving the ps3 . Why would it help move a $500 console in 2013 when bluray is even cheaper ?

There are newer codecs coming all the time and its only a matter of time before streaming video surpases bluray . Not to mention many movie studios are starting to push ultra voliet out there , it may not be long before yo ucan simply buy the ultra vilot verison.

No matter what you might feel about Bluray , its no longer a major selling point because of the low cost of players in the market. I got a 2d bluray player with wifi for $80 the week after christmas. I would expect that cost to be down to $50 for this holiday and I bet 3d wifi players will be at $80 to $50 by 2013 holiday.

 

[eastmen]

Sooo, it costs 30 cents more? Those monsters! Has been a pretty effective anti-piracy measure as well...

I'm not sayin gthey are monsters , they did this at the start of the gen back in 2006, do you really think in 2006 a bluray cost only 30 cents more than a dvd to press ?

So, only 20 times what it costs for a bluray, instead of 30?

Depends on how much you think a bluray costs.

Huge competitive disadvantage against any platform that does not disable used sales.

The ps3 and xbox both already have measures to reduce the attractiveness of used games. Flash just gives greater control over the used market and allows the publisher to keep the used game cost celling higher than what sony and ms can do with current systems.

Now instead of getting a code for more multiplayer maps or other dlc when you buy new , you simply have to pay to unlock the flash card to work in another console. The company can set games at $15 for the first month and then pull back the price as the game gets older and the new copy drops in price.

Huge competitive disadvantage against any platform that does not increse new game prices.

Last gen the prices increased and I don't doubt htat this gen they will increase again. I rather get a benfit with that increase instead of relying on old tech

Inflection point occurs after only the first 3 games or so. Every game after that loses money compared to optical.

Depends on what you think the costs are. Also depends on how many games you think the average console owner buys.

Probably more expensive than just making new carts.

Mabye

Eating $30 up front makes sense when the other option is eating $10 for every piece of software in perpetuity. There is no way to make the math work. The options are catastrophic failure in the market, losing more money than you're making by subsidizing the cost burden or simply using optical like everyone else.

Only if those are the numbers you believe. what if its closer to $70 and $5 and what if you don't have to eat any cost for the software and simply pass it to the consumer in multiple ways.


Both the 3ds and vita have carts. Sony could have stayed with optical but moved to nand. Nintendo went Nand again and both systems have software that is more expensvie than the previous portable consoles. I don't really hear a huge uproar.

 

[TheWretched]

Rage suffered many problems on the pc , a platform that has no compromises , one of them was the image quality. Mega textures is just not a good way to go.

That's a very narrow point of view. Rage on PC suffered massive consolities and not much more. With working drivers, there were no problems at all. The main problem was game size and not much else. Carmack himself said as much... he even considered making a "high res texture pack" for PC at some point.

It's because of megatextures the game was so huge, but it was also quite a big game, too (at least imho).

 

[-tkf-]

It has been discussed on here , sorry if i don't feel like searching for stuff that happened in 2006. Also having two forms of DRM doesn't seem to bother Sony. The playstation 2 had games released on both cd and dvd and the ps3 is able to play ps2 dvds just fine.

Sony should have developed a brand new DRM scheme just for DVD, instead of just sticking with the Blu-Ray solution, which haven´t been cracked? It doesn't make sense, at all. DVD on the 360 was cracked how fast?

Rage suffered many problems on the pc , a platform that has no compromises , one of them was the image quality. Mega textures is just not a good way to go.

So now John Carmacks Mega Textures is not a good way to go? The compromise was made because of the 360 limit. Which brings us to your ignores...


Games on Flash will be compromised because of size?
Will big games will cost more?
Production costs, you ignore the production line, you ignore the added cost of producing the carts compared to Blu-Ray. There is more to flash than just the chips and plastic.
I pay more for my flash game, what do i get for that extra money?

The investment in flash production WILL be a part of the system from the get-go, so it´s not just the price of the cart. While Blu-Ray is already established as is the production lines. So you can´t expect consoles without Blu-Ray to just be $30 cheaper. You have to add that cost to the console, from the start.

Produce 50m systems with an optical drive and pay at least 2,500,000,000 more in system costs .

That would be a hell of a launch
The cost of Flash would be a part of the launch price, on paper it might be cheaper to produce the consoles, but the investment would still have to be paid back. We have a good example with Blu-Ray vs DVD from this generation.

In the united states it doesn't seem like Blu-ray is moving the ps3 . Why would it help move a $500 console in 2013 when bluray is even cheaper ?

It moved them at launch, which was the important part, but i think you know very well that wasn't what i meant. My example was a Console with cheap games and Blu-Ray vs a Console without Blu-Ray and expensive games, though i don´t expect a flash console to be that much cheaper based on flash alone...

There are newer codecs coming all the time and its only a matter of time before streaming video surpases bluray . Not to mention many movie studios are starting to push ultra voliet out there , it may not be long before yo ucan simply buy the ultra vilot verison.

Why wouldn't i expect such an expensive Console to support bluray playback?

There are newer codecs coming all the time and its only a matter of time before streaming video surpases bluray . Not to mention many movie studios are starting to push ultra voliet out there , it may not be long before yo ucan simply buy the ultra vilot verison.

What does new codecs have to to with Blu-Ray playback? With Blu-Ray you can stream and buy a disc, optimal solution. Without Blu-Ray you just have to rely on streaming, your ISP cap on bandwidth and regional systems.

No matter what you might feel about Bluray , its no longer a major selling point because of the low cost of players in the market.

Me feelings have nothing to do with anything, they were invested when HD-DVD died, back then i was feeling fantastic. Blu-Ray is here and it´s not going away, my opinion is that it would be an added value to any console and it easily matches the proposed $30 dollars. $30 dollars for a 3D Blu-Ray player, a games medium and cheaper games. Yes please!

 

[function]

That's a fair argument, but far from conclusive. If the only purpose in optical in Wuu is BC, and flash is supposed to be better in every other way, why not chuck in a dirt cheap DVD drive instead of a more expensive BRD derivative and have a card port for Wuu games? Wuu hasn't even got an HDD for caching, and likely won't feature an SSD either, so performance data access from optical won't be there. What'll they have? Optical and local flash storage? They consider that more economical than supporting cards? Yep. So why not the same for MS and Sony who will likely be needing more storage than Wuu?

The only thing I can propose is that things might work out differently for MS because of a lower physical attach rate, while selling more hardware because of lower base unit cost and more aesthetically attractive hardware. And (to flog a possibly none existent horse) better returns from a greater proportion of new game sales.

The cheapest form of flash distribution would be using something like an SD card with about 12 MB/s of peak read bandwidth. This would actually give you some disadvantages compared to, say, a 6X CAV bluray drive. While virtual texturing would probably work better off the flash, anything more traditional (which 99% of WiiU ports will probably be) would work better from the bluray drive. A slow flash based distribution system would work massively better aided by a partial (or full if you want it) HDD install, which the WiiU as it is can't support. If you were planning for every system to have a HDD anyway (because you're all about online services "going forwards") it might be another story.

There's no getting round the fact that optical is cheaper per GB. The handicap would reduce significantly over the lifetime of the system as 16GB and (hopefully) 32GB flash chips because common and cheap, but there would always be a disadvantage. On the plus side, you don't need to a make a "DD only" system at any point because your SD reader is almost free and takes up no space - so you never lock anyone out of taking a game round to a friend's house, getting a game as a presesnt etc and so you never have to make a PSP Go (lol etc).

The way I'd see the economics possibly working out is something like this:

Physical attach rate of 5 games per console, with average flash card cost of $5 a game = $25.

Cost of bluray (possibly writeable) drive + larger console case + shipping + 5 * disk cost = > $25

Of course there are also other factors like scalping people who buy the elite system with the optical drive (for BC and bluray movies), gaining sales because the system looks better, losing sales if the retail price of flash games is too high, losing sales because of PR around game sizes (in GB and real/perceived content) and all kinds of stuff that's really hard to weight up. There's a lot that's really hard to try and judge and balance. I wouldn't bet money on MS ditching optical, but I still wouldn't rule it out at.