Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech
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It won't ever matched optical obviously and I stated that but those solid state tech will become cheaper. If you look at the progress of those USB flash, their prices have really come down. 2 GB can be had for pocket change now days. Eventually 8-16 GB will be pocket change and so on. And I reckoned read only solid state may be cheaper to produce.
Just look at NDS ROM catridge size incremental increases, it became quite significant when you start doubling a large size. but look at NDS catridges Vs PSP UMD. It can work as distribution model. When everyone here were writing Nintendo off with catridges, they're still around with ROM catridges.
Those machines are cheap to run. They don't even need a store. They can be like vending machine. Put in your credit card and flash and get your game.
I saw a music store with about 8 or more of those machines. I think you can run it off a single server, so you can have one server and maybe upto 64 front end.
It's a nice idea, but seems a bit chicken-and-egg to me. No compnay will install kiosks without a market for it, and what console company is going to produce a flash-distribution system with no outlets catering for it? There'd need to be a concerted effort by one of the companies to pay for the kiosks in all the right places, and have the infrastructure there Day 1 that people aren't extremely peeved with being unable to get a game. I can buy whatever I want online if the stores don't have it, but that needs a physical medium that can be sent through the post. Also what happens regards archiving? Let's say you buy a game, put it on PS4, play it, finish it, then replace it with other games. What if 2 years later you want to break it out and play it again when you no longer have a copy?
If all three console companies went with this, it'd happen and probably work. If just one does it, I think it'll flop. Too much inconvenience. Perhaps in combination with downloads, it'd work. Background downloading would enable a person to start playing after not too long while the rest of the game is downloaded. I find I'm surprising willing to buy PSN titles. As long as they can cater for downloaders and offliners suitably, the disk could go. Would be nice to have true consoles again! Though I do like the full-media system. One machine to play everything is convenient.
What do you mean? Of course there is a market for it. With the right pricing this could certainly help swing consumers toward digital distribution. Sony already setup over 300 demo download stations for the PSP in Japan back in 2006. So the step is not that big and the PSP may show the way just like the PSP game rental service I mentioned in my previous post.
And why would not outlets cater for it? The platformholders could certainly find stores that would reserve some space for the kiosks. The games-only stores may not be strong supporters of the idea because it may predict their death in the long term, but with the right contract they may also house some of those kiosks. The current gen games with physical distribution media are not going away any time soon so it may just be seen as a complement for many years to come.
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How much use fdo they get? Seems like a very limited trial to me, with few games, and now that download PSP titles are taking off, they serve even less purpose. We've already had mention of previous kiosk systems which died the death. As CEO of GameStop, what are the arguments for and against you'd consider? In favour, no stock to worry about. Against, the death of their lucrative second-hand market. How will shoppers browse? Fake disk cases, or standing at a kiosk looking at the library while frustrated customers line up behind them? When Sony are desigining their new system, how do they design for a kiosk system if they haven't already secured a kiosk infrastructure? How can you design for it from Day 1? They need contracts signed to ensure there's a way for customers to get games, so what is going to be the way they'll get the CEO's to sign up to a kiosk system? I can't see a straight forward proposition being popular.
"Our next console will use kiosks to sell games onto flash sticks (o-oh, there goes second-hand sales). We'll provide the kiosks free of charge (won't be able to charge for them surely) and a contact number for engineers if they fail (how much are technical glitches going to affect sales?)."
Does any company have enough weight to be able to demand compliance, or can the BnM stores happily refuse to stock the system? What about online? Why sell consoles at Play or Amazon if there's little follow-up market from software (actually true about downloads only)? It seems to me lack of hard media means a system that needs to be completely solo'd by the console company, producing and selling hardware and software through their own channels that aren't currently part of the retail sector, and needing to reeducate the populace that when they don't see PS4/XB9000/Sqiiz consoles or games available anywhere, it's not because there's no demand for the products.
specwarGP2
Regular
The kiosks could be installed anywhere. I've actually seen vending machines that sell ipods and cellphones at department stores and movie theaters.
Blazkowicz
Legend
Flash sticks are very slow for write, more like 10MB/s, so a 50GB game would be north of one hour downloading. not fun, especially as the stick is hanging out of the vending machine all the time.
even for 10 minutes that's a problem, it would get stolen. So there'd be some mechanism to store the stick inside, locked away from people who pass by.
A straight forward way to introduce download kiosks for the current gen console is to let the buyer bring a usb-flash/drive with your live/psn-id and/or console id pre-loaded from your console. The game will be encrypted with a key based on those data, your purchase is registered and you get a receipt which you could reclaim if your drive breaks. Shouldn´t take long time to pick the game you want to download at the kiosk and many users could have their USB-drives loading at the same time.
How make it popular? Just give the digital distribution an attractive price point. Shouldn´t be hard to motivate given it is less work for the personnel and less place needed for game racks and storage area, less transports etc..
I am not saying this will happen but I think the threshold is much lower than what you make it look like. Introducing digital distribution for all games over internet is of course what is easiest if the platformholders decide to go in this direction and is probably where it will happen first for stationary consoles.
I don´t think hard media is going to disappear any time soon just like CD records will be around for many years to come, but there may be a premium to be payed for hard media compared to digital distributions in a couple of years (maybe even sooner) and there may be other benefits from digital distributions that may help the platform holders swing customer behaviour, like conveniance. I also said before that for the next generation consoles there may be preloaded flash memories that could replace optical disks as hard media bought at retail. I believe there will be a market for hard media in the future, but it may get a price premium that will make it less competetive.
And I don´t think we need to worry about the retail (online or physical) when discussing this. The world is not a static place, they need to adapts just like anyone else. Maybe their golden era is over, maybe they have peaked and from now on they will shrink in importance and other distribution channels will grow.
The i-phone app-store has certainly changed the playing-field and the new PSP will move in the same direction as well as Live and PSN will keep growing in importance.
Well in the context of this thread, rather than the 'Flash as a replacement for disks' discussion, the idea is for the new hardware to go without an optical drive. We have to thrash out how feasible that is for nAo to have his way!
Again, with regard the context of discussion, the fate of the BnM stores isn't relative beyond how much influence they have on the next hardware. Will they encourage or resist an optical-driveless console?
I think nAo could have his way, but I think it all depends on when you believe the next generation will appear. Having the current/last played game stored in a flash-cache sounds like an awesome idea.
I think from the success of the i-phone as a gaming platform we can deduce that they have very little influence.
You will be able to buy your next gen console from any CE-vendor connect it to internet and get access to all the games you will ever need.
Bypassing retail will save the platform holders loads of money they instead can spend on efficient marketing.
It's quite silly to compare portables to standalone consoles, two different markets. There is no current generation console that uses carts.
That analogy is silly. Those are portables so they benefit hugely by not having an big optical disc as a storage medium. It makes little sense to move to kiosk-based distribution for home consoles....portables sure.
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Not sure that's a valid comparison. Can we deduce from the success of iPod that CDs can be scrapped and BnM music stores closed down? Would the iPhone store exist if iPhone hadn't offered a phone as the principle reason to own the device, or if downloads were 20 GBs in size? At the moment iPhone content is small enough to fit the distribution model, but if it had to deal with multi-gigabyte downloads, would it cope?
I'm not seeing any parallel system to distributing large downloads through an offline network. Download titles remain fairly petite, and even long existing download services (Steam) haven't replaced hard media. Given the choice, plenty of people are sticking to buying disks. Sony are releasing the PixelJunk download titles on disc for non-downloading markets. For the present I can see downloads and hard media coexisting, offering choice, but nothing I can see points to a useable optical-drive free console. Best case, the discs are replaced with SD cards, but that's highly improbable despite being way cool!
You are missing the point, the point is that digital content is growing in importance. If the platformholders want to remove the disc-drive for cost-reasons or that they want to kill the used-games market or whatever, kiosks may be a transitional alternative until everyone has a good enough internet connection. By the time the next generation is introduced I expect the broadband penetranation to be pretty good in the developed market and the early adopters will certainly have it, but I also said there may be other hard medias beside optical discs by the time next generation is introduced and then the kiosks may not make sense at all. FYI I don´t expect any true next generation consoles before 2013.
grandmaster
Veteran
The only way kiosks will work will be if the game is substantially cheaper. As the retailer presumably needs to keep his cut, the only way to lower price while maintaining margin would be to take away the production cost price... which is mere cents. The alternative is asking consumers to pay the same price for something intangible which they won't feel they own, and that's why it's never going to happen.
Also... who's going to pay for the kiosks? How many will they need? Will that number be doubled as they use one for each platform? Can you imagine the queues on a weekend? They're already long enough in my game store. I had to wait 20 minutes in line to buy a new 360 the last time I was in there. If I had to wait 10-15 minutes per person as they waited for their games to copy across there'd be lines going outside of the doors.
The whole kiosk notion simply doesn't work for a whole host of reasons.
Also... who's going to pay for the kiosks? How many will they need? Will that number be doubled as they use one for each platform? Can you imagine the queues on a weekend? They're already long enough in my game store. I had to wait 20 minutes in line to buy a new 360 the last time I was in there. If I had to wait 10-15 minutes per person as they waited for their games to copy across there'd be lines going outside of the doors.
The whole kiosk notion simply doesn't work for a whole host of reasons.
I know for sure that the i-Pod did not have an optical disk drive built-in at time of introduction and it faired pretty well. People can change habits if there are tangible benefits and it has the right price.
And I do not expect internet speeds to remain the same for the years to come, I know there are better ADSL-connections coming, I know there are full scale tests of wireless 4G networks in progress. 20 GB portable games may be stretch for many years, but within ten years, sure why not.
Keyword: present. Given that we talk about the presence, I basically agree with everything you say. I don´t think offline downloads for home consoles in stores is very likely, but maybe for different reasons. When do you expect the next true (not just an upgrade) generation of consoles?
FYI I have bought both GT5 Prologue and Burnout Paradise as DLC (I believe they were in the range of 3-5 GB). They may have taken a while to download, don´t really remember, it obviously didn´t bother me. In comparison to going to a store or buying online and waiting for delivery I find it to be a really a convenient way of buying games.
If you asked everyone in the line if they had a broadband connection? What percentage do you think it would be? Everyone with a decent internet connection would not go to the store to download.
And what would the percentage be 4 years from now?
Maybe a hard-drive will be optional just like the PSP will exist in two models one with diskdrive and one without, that may be an option as well. Maybe some download games at home, people with crappy internet connection download at the store and some people take the plunge and pay the premium for a disk media.
Personally i believe that four years from now the price of a 32 GB flash is within the realm to be used and for each year that passes that size could grow 50%.
The physical media will carry a price premium but it will very likely remain an option, don´t get me wrong today I am not predicting that it will disappear totally. But depending on how well the new PSP business is working I may change my mind.
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But people didn't buy the iPhone for the games! The games came about as a nice extra, using the network features. What of the iPhone instead had been iPod Game, with no phone feature, and the only access to games was downloads? Would people have bought it then confident of the game service? DSi and PSP are stepping tentatively towards downloads, but as limited services as the waters are tested. And for PSP, removal of a drive makes sense to improve the experience. Consoles need more storage and are less concerned with power consumption, so the incentive to go download only is diminished.
Ten years is well after next-gen hardware! And the rollout of broadband across the UK is anything but stellar. I expect I'll have no choice beyond 8 megabit (4 megabit achieved) for some years yet if I'm still at this residence. You can't cater for 20 megabit boradband owners unless you are happy to have a massively shrunk market!
Now perhaps in combination with kiosks, those who can download do leaving everyone else to pop to the store, it would work. But I think the benefits of optical media make all that faf not worth it. Carry on as normal for another generation, with every console being a BRD player too. Install everything to HDD/internal flash if needed for performance. By the end of the generation fingers crossed full download/on demand gaming will be possible.
Not before end of 2012.
I agree. It's something I'm fairly happy to do, although internet use capping will push BRD-sized downloads across several days for me I think. I just think those happy to do it will be a small part of the market. Many will still want discs, and so the system could not be sold without. Unless there was perhaps a cheaper download-only SKU? That might be the way to go, offering people the choice and allowing the different markets to grow and shrink as needed.
That won't last. Ye olde flash chips were low throughput because their main market only needed low throughput, not because it made them much cheaper. Next generation of flash chips will be much higher throughput, because the intended market has changed.
The console manufacturers central system still has it registered to your gamer ID and device ID ... depending on how nice they want to be they could simply offer a new download for a fee or even free.
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