Optical Drive VS HDD

[winstonsmith1978]

When will we see a home console ditch Optical drives and replace them with only a HDD. It seems to me that the only way anyone is going to knock Sony off it’s pedestal is by doing something as drastic as what Sony did to Nintendo: Change the format. The answer would be to create a console based around the internet, HDD and an iTunes style download service. Developers could spend less money on publishers and middle men like Gamestop, Bestbuy and Wal-Mart and spend more time and money on games.

This would drive down the cost of making a game and be very similar to the CD vs. Cartridge war. I think game developers would jump on this as long as the security was tight.

So do you think this is possible in the near future?

I would think Microsoft or Nintendo would be the first to attempt such a thing. Microsoft because of their love for the internet/HDD and the fact that they don’t care about Blu-ray or HD-DVD. Nintendo because of their virtual console and download service that will copy iTunes.

What do you think? I would love not having to leave my house to purchase a new game. Not to mention games would play much better from a HDD.

 

[bRoNx]

This will be the case in the future, I'm sure. But ATM, broadband internet isn't readily available everywhere and to everyone, so anyone who chooses to go this route will be limiting themselves to only users with high speed broadband connections.

A thought: Maybe they can release 2 versions of a game as a trial. One that you'd buy from a retailer for $x, and then a downloadable version which (I'd imagine) would be much less.

 

[one]

Welcome to the future.

 

[Powderkeg]

Welcome to the future.

I was going to mention that.

 

[doob]

While i'd like that to happen, i strongly doubt it will become a "industry standard"
You seem to forget that large (at least 15Mbit) bandwidth connections are far far away from today peoples homes(and just the major capital cities! not to mention the rest), i dont see in the near decade a strong (by strong i mean a wide worldwide implementation of those infrastructures spreaded on almost every corners of majority of world countries). Some will say 15Mbit? Thats overkil. Is it? Software tend to offer more features and security and by so require much more data, i dont see people paying for a software and having to wait hours or days to fisnish the download of it.
So with all this said i think that process won't be viable, and the online data feed will remain to do its purposes it has done till today, maybe add video instead of just voice comunication on online games when the real large bandwidth arrives.

IMO the only way to that "dream" to be realized in a viable and effective way, would be when broad internet access (and broad with both meaning *high*bandwidth that surpasses the data input/output of storage devices (wont happen, but doens't mean it isn't possible) and by large market implementation in peoples homes.

People already complain about long loading times on consoles and computers, they want to be entertained not bored and suffering with anxiety hours and days for its latest purchased game (or even a free demo) to be downloaded, and installed.
Storage devices offer a faster (don't know if more cheapper) way of the old "insert coint" entertainment

 

[ihamoitc2005]

Bandwidth & Storage

Biggest limitation is bandwidth and storage cost. Bandwidth is not enough to download 4 to 40 GByte next-gen games quickly and hard-drives capable of holding 150GByte of multiple games is too expensive. But you are right this must be way of the future, it is unstoppable eventuality if real-world sustained bandwidth during peak usage period becomes much faster.

Phantom has inferior performance compared to Xbox360, Revolution, PS3 and cost saving, if any is not so important. Look at GameCube ... similar capability to other consoles at lower price yet inferior sales.

Also look at Xbox360. Seems in many places real market-determined value of Xbox360 is much higher than $299/399 yet because actual hardware unit must be held at list price, difference between market price and list price is filled with accessories so atleast some of that price difference is recovered by retailer. Many Xbox360 pre-order is "bundle only" costing $700+ dollars including games/accesories many buyers may not want but purchase anyway so perhaps price advantage not so important no?

 

[Platon]

The gen after this we might see something like that in a limited way. There might be some games that will be available for download in parallel with the existing on DVD, but before that happens there must be a much much bigger broadband penetration around the world...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If PS3 really makes use of BluRay drives, we're talking 20+ GB games. We're talking a need for insane amounts of super cheap storage (which is what optical drives gives us) or super-dooper fast connections to download games. I'm not sure either will exist for many, many years, as each generation as the connection speeds increase, so do the game sizes. In 5 years time perhaps we'll have maybe 20 MBit broadband standard (ha ha yeah right!), 2.5 MB a second. Perhaps a 20 GB game can be downloaded in a couple of hours. But then we'll start to see bigger games. Unless everything's procedurally created then.

Until we've all got dedicated fibreoptic Gigabit networks to central servers, I don't think it'll happen mainstream for consoles. There is of course smaller games (filesize) for PCs and console minigames.

 

[PC-Engine]

I could see portable game consoles using a HDD instead of optical long before home consoles simply because portable games will not need to be more than a couple of GBs for the next decade. Downloading a couple of GBs to your PC then to your portable through USB 2.0 will work even with today's broadband connections. You would not want to download it straight to your portable wirelessly though since the battery would probably be dead before the whole game is downloaded.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Though I tend agree, and we might see Flash Storage being the medium rather than an HDD (over 10 years especially), I'm not sure that 2 GBs will be the limit for handhelds. PSP is at that now and in five-six years perhaps there'll be more hardware (PSP2, Nintendo actually creating a new GB instead of just making a thumb-sized GB Nano ) and larger games?

 

[Platon]

Although maybe many games could be at 20GB+ in the future I can still se them being downloadable. The thing is that you will not have to download the whole thing, you could be downloading a level at a time...

 

[PC-Engine]

Though I tend agree, and we might see Flash Storage being the medium rather than an HDD (over 10 years especially), I'm not sure that 2 GBs will be the limit for handhelds. PSP is at that now and in five-six years perhaps there'll be more hardware (PSP2, Nintendo actually creating a new GB instead of just making a thumb-sized GB Nano ) and larger games?

Portable games will always have more restrictions than home console games. For example development costs. Maybe it's just me but I don't see portable games being more than a couple GBs in the next 10 years. In the next 10 years we'll have over 100 GBs 1.8 or 1inch HDDs. That's enough to store 50 games. Oh btw PSP games are not even close to 2GBs...that's the capacity of the UMDs.

Even a game like RE4 that's less than 3GBs on a tiny portable screen would look incredible for the next 5 years. We're talking about a big budget game here too. Not likely to happen on portables for a long time.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Portable games will always have more restrictions than home console games. For example development costs. Maybe it's just me but I don't see portable games being more than a couple GBs in the next 10 years. In the next 10 years we'll have over 100 GBs 1.8 or 1inch HDDs. That's enough to store 50 games. Oh btw PSP games are not even close to 2GBs...that's the capacity of the UMDs.

Even a game like RE4 that's less than 3GBs on a tiny portable screen would look incredible for the next 5 years. We're talking about a big budget game here too. Not likely to happen on portables for a long time.

Your probably right. The UMD's 1.8 is gobbled up with movies but not games. Though it'll be interesting to see how close to the limit games get. Presumably they're not going to fill it with as much content as streaming isn't really an option, so it's kinda 32 MB's total per level/area.

 

[Powderkeg]

While i'd like that to happen, i strongly doubt it will become a "industry standard"
You seem to forget that large (at least 15Mbit) bandwidth connections are far far away from today peoples homes(and just the major capital cities!

What?

15Mbit is far, far away?

http://www22.verizon.com/FiosForHome/channels/Fios/HighSpeedInternetForHome.asp

 

[Shifty Geezer]

New BW's are only locally available. The broadband network of the UK is currently mostly 2 Megabit. There's 8 Mb in the UK and I'd be running on it on no extra cost, but only a small percentage of the UK is currently covered. It'll be another few years before 8 Mb becomes widespread here at the current mainstream price of £15-20 pm. 15 Mb won't be mainstream until 5-7 years+ I reckon.