Is PlayGo or play-as-you-download impractical?

[inlimbo]

Is PlayGo or play-as-you-download practical?

It makes sense if you design your game around it and pack your files accordingly, but that's not gonna work for every game or even most games, I'd think. Open world is essentially off the table unless heavily sectioned or Sony offers buyers a Gakai stream in the interim.

I don't see how this works but for select games. It can't see general use unless most devs design with it in mind, and that seems especially limiting. Am I missing something? Has this been talked to death already?

 

[dragonelite]

For open world games you could start in a tutorial building/level?
Have a big opening cut scene you can't skip if the game detects the os is still doing
background downloading or installing. I think microsoft said you something like 1.5Mb/s connection on the X1? That should at least help devs to plan accordingly.
Not sure if sony has minimal internet bandwidth requirements

 

[patsu]

It makes sense if you design your game around it and pack your files accordingly, but that's not gonna work for every game or even most games, I'd think. Open world is essentially off the table unless heavily sectioned or Sony offers buyers a Gakai stream in the interim.

I don't see how this works but for select games. It can't see general use unless most devs design with it in mind, and that seems especially limiting. Am I missing something? Has this been talked to death already?

Sony will likely phase their deliverables. It is okay if some games don't benefit from progressive download. The ultimate goal is probably game streaming.

Edit:
They should not shoehorn a technology into games if it's not a good fit. Sony usually leave the final implementation decision to the developers because they know best. We will see what they come up with.

 

[TheWretched]

For open world games you could start in a tutorial building/level?
Have a big opening cut scene you can't skip if the game detects the os is still doing
background downloading or installing. I think microsoft said you something like 1.5Mb/s connection on the X1? That should at least help devs to plan accordingly.
Not sure if sony has minimal internet bandwidth requirements

MBit/s, mind you. Not MByte/s. Up until April, I was stuck with 3Mbit/s... you can average a gigabyte per hour, if you're lucky. Not practical at all for something like that.

Even 16MBit/s would be pushing it borderline slow. I mean, we're talking ~2MB/s. PS3 can do 9MB/s, at it is already on the slow end, if it doesn't use the HDD for caching.

 

[ERP]

I guess it depends on how long you play in the first play session on average and how long after that you play for the second time. The background download does continue when you stop playing.

 

[Cyan]

MBit/s, mind you. Not MByte/s. Up until April, I was stuck with 3Mbit/s... you can average a gigabyte per hour, if you're lucky. Not practical at all for something like that.

Even 16MBit/s would be pushing it borderline slow. I mean, we're talking ~2MB/s. PS3 can do 9MB/s, at it is already on the slow end, if it doesn't use the HDD for caching.

That might explain why a friend of mine told me yesterday that he had been playing The Last of Us and the game was downloading in the background while he played, and he said that he experienced sound glitches, like audio freezing.

 

[BoardBonobo]

Where I am it won't be practical, probably ever. The connection here varies between a high of ~2.4Mbps down to ~950Kbps. It's also one of the reasons a pure DD marketplace would be out of the question.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Where I am it won't be practical, probably ever. The connection here varies between a high of ~2.4Mbps down to ~950Kbps. It's also one of the reasons a pure DD marketplace would be out of the question.

At some point you will either get better internet or be out of luck. A market does not need 100% consumer coverage (or anywhere near it) to be viable.

 

[inlimbo]

Well, TLOU requires at least 50% of the game before you start playing, is very linear, and is a lengthy game (around 18 hours). It's also divided into seasons and themes which would allow them to pack the game into sections with essential reusable assets and more specific content sorted differently.

I'm guessing the audio glitches (of which I experienced a sound drop out or two in the disc version) are more likely part of the general batch of issues people have been reporting and not the fault of play-as-you-download.

But as ideal a trial case as TLOU seems, it still requires 50% of the game presumably because it's putting tons of different assets on the screen at any given time. And not every game is gonna be structured like it, anyway, so it's weird to me that Sony or Microsoft is suggesting that "just minutes and you'll be playing" is a viable goal for this kind of digital delivery.

 

[Arwin]

I think it would be good for games to support this setup. The bare minimum is the divide between multiplayer and singleplayer downloads, as Killzone: Shadow Fall showed in the UI trailer. But there are plenty of other reasons to go for it. First of all, my current download speed, which isn't the fastest, is at 7MB/s. The best speed you can get from BluRay, after a while and on the outer layer, is 27MB/s. That isn't such a huge difference, and it's feasible that in five years time a lot of people will have access to that kind of speed at home.

Second, at 7MB/s, it only takes an hour to download 25GB. So an initial download that allows me to start playing only needs an hour of gameplay before it can lay out the whole game world out for you. Start me up with the menu and settings screen, and allow me the fiddle around in there, then start a small tutorial level or whatever, and before you know it, an hour has passed and the full game is already there.

Third, there are many game-types that are even more suitable for this than most. Take a regular racing game like Gran Turismo or Forza. You just need one track and a few cars to start with. Make that a 10 minute race at least, and the first 2.4GB are downloaded, etc. Or for multiplayer CoD or Battlefield, start with one map, and play in there until the rest has downloaded.

Many of this still holds up if your connection is 2MB/s, but will count more and more when download speeds and game sizes inevitably go up as the generation progresses.

 

[Betanumerical]

I think it would be good for games to support this setup. The bare minimum is the divide between multiplayer and singleplayer downloads, as Killzone: Shadow Fall showed in the UI trailer. But there are plenty of other reasons to go for it. First of all, my current download speed, which isn't the fastest, is at 7MB/s. The best speed you can get from BluRay, after a while and on the outer layer, is 27MB/s. That isn't such a huge difference, and it's feasible that in five years time a lot of people will have access to that kind of speed at home.

Second, at 7MB/s, it only takes an hour to download 25GB. So an initial download that allows me to start playing only needs an hour of gameplay before it can lay out the whole game world out for you. Start me up with the menu and settings screen, and allow me the fiddle around in there, then start a small tutorial level or whatever, and before you know it, an hour has passed and the full game is already there.

Third, there are many game-types that are even more suitable for this than most. Take a regular racing game like Gran Turismo or Forza. You just need one track and a few cars to start with. Make that a 10 minute race at least, and the first 2.4GB are downloaded, etc. Or for multiplayer CoD or Battlefield, start with one map, and play in there until the rest has downloaded.

Many of this still holds up if your connection is 2MB/s, but will count more and more when download speeds and game sizes inevitably go up as the generation progresses.

7MB/s is 56Mbit/s.

Thats huge, I bet at least 80% of the developed world doesn't have access to those kind of speeds.

 

[inlimbo]

Third, there are many game-types that are even more suitable for this than most. Take a regular racing game like Gran Turismo or Forza. You just need one track and a few cars to start with. Make that a 10 minute race at least, and the first 2.4GB are downloaded, etc. Or for multiplayer CoD or Battlefield, start with one map, and play in there until the rest has downloaded.

But even in a racing game many assets are reused across all tracks. If those assets are big enough (accounting for textures, models, animation and sound), then even a single track could require a good chunk of the game to play. It's not as simple as splitting each level or track into equal chunks, right? You'd have to design your game so that the first level establishes a baseline and each subsequent level is additive.

But it's a baseline that would have to fit into one or two gigabytes and that seems less than ideal. I have no idea how Guerilla games plans to do this with a game as florid as Killzone Shadow Fall. Maybe they're using a ton of procedural textures.

 

[Arwin]

7MB/s is 56Mbit/s.

Thats huge, I bet at least 80% of the developed world doesn't have access to those kind of speeds.

Like I said though, the principles mostly hold up at 2MB/s.

But even in a racing game many assets are reused across all tracks. If those assets are big enough (accounting for textures, models, animation and sound), then even a single track could require a good chunk of the game to play. It's not as simple as splitting each level or track into equal chunks, right? You'd have to design your game so that the first level establishes a baseline and each subsequent level is additive.

But it's a baseline that would have to fit into one or two gigabytes and that seems less than ideal. I have no idea how Guerilla games plans to do this with a game as florid as Killzone Shadow Fall. Maybe they're using a ton of procedural textures.

No, stuff isn't reused as much as you think.

 

[BoardBonobo]

At some point you will either get better internet or be out of luck. A market does not need 100% consumer coverage (or anywhere near it) to be viable.

But the coverage they would get is < 30%, would they be willing to give up ~70% of the market? And as long as there are disc based solutions nobody is out of luck. They just need to get smarter about how those disc based solutions are managed.

 

[AlphaWolf]

But the coverage they would get is < 30%, would they be willing to give up ~70% of the market? And as long as there are disc based solutions nobody is out of luck. They just need to get smarter about how those disc based solutions are managed.

Your numbers are a bit off (US avg speed is over 5Mb). Disc will eventually go away, there's some hurdles yet, but physical media is endangered.

 

[BoardBonobo]

Your numbers are a bit off (US avg speed is over 5Mb). Disc will eventually go away, there's some hurdles yet, but physical media is endangered.

The US has an average of ~7.4Mbps whilst the Global average is ~2.9Mbps with an increase of ~25% YoY.

I understand the need to get rid of physical packaging, the costs involved etc. I'm just thinking that now is too soon by a good decade or so. Maybe the next iteration of devices will be luck enough to come into a world that is capable of supporting such grandiose schemes.

 

[Arwin]

I think it is very important to realise that this is why there are still discs, but that with these DD features, platform holders are not servicing that crowd. They are making these play while download features for those gamers that would consider downloads in the first place.

 

[inlimbo]

No, stuff isn't reused as much as you think.

In any case, your point stands. It works if you accommodate it. But it's not the most practical idea given the likely scope of next-gen development, and 5 to 8 gb ram pools.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The US has an average of ~7.4Mbps.

7.6 according to Akamai State of the Internet Report. What's shocking is places with insane BB like South Korea actually have a 14 MBps average speed. It's only average peak connection where the really big numbers kick in.

 

[TheWretched]

The average is a worthless number in a comparison like this. Same goes for average wages etc.

I'd like to see a median. Should be easily doable for Akami to provide those numbers as well.