I don't get this argument. Every GameStop, Walmart, Best Buy, etc I've been to have Xbox 360 & Playstation 3 demo units. What's the difference with them making a more involved unit that sells games too?
Tommy McClain
Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech
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I don't get this argument. Every GameStop, Walmart, Best Buy, etc I've been to have Xbox 360 & Playstation 3 demo units. What's the difference with them making a more involved unit that sells games too?
Tommy McClain
What are the bottlenecks to write speed? What are the limiting factors that meant developers went with slow systems instead of fast ones? If they could have produced faster chips at no greater cost, I don't get why they didn't and get a sales point ahead of the competition.
If downloading, sure. What if your game comes from a kiosk though? This is of course likely a tiddly concern relative to the whole market, much like backwards compatibility. At the end of the day, most people don't care. Heck, most people don't ever finish their games, let alone care to play them years after when there are new games to play!
As I said before, you'd go there with your device ID. Preferably on a USB stick ... but they could even allow you to simply enter it on a keyboard, so the only thing you would need is a scrap of paper.
And them to have it on the system! Do we anticipate they store every game ever made on the local HDDs? With current storage that's not such a far-fetched notion, with a few TBs of HDD space fitting the majority of DVD titles. Otherwise they'll need to offer a download service for anything not on local store, where you'll have to wait goodness knows how long. I think there'd be a time limit, like online games, after which the plug is pulled and if you haven't got it, too bad.
The cost of an optical drive is not only the physical drive itself, but also hardware considerations that must be made to fit the unit. The extra ram that a console would require to cover for the slow streaming rate and also the $10 or so fee to play BR movies and a little extra ram. In all it probably would about $40-50 to fit a BR drive to a next generation console if it has one. Also even a download only SKU has to bear some of these costs as the console units must be standardised.
Shifting away from the optical drive would allow a console manufacturer to make a console which is less noisy, less prone to breaking down and simpler to manufacture. They could get away with using less ram, and the unit itself would have a far lower fixed cost as the major component costs would be elecrical and not mechanical.
The flash industry itself gets bigger every year. The manufacturing cost and the cost of the flash itself is constantly going down every year. By the time the next generation of consoles come out many of the fabs in the world would be due to switch to the 450nm wafer process which will make the marginal cost per mm^2 per chip dive considerably. Now the space requirements for games is somewhere between the current 6.8GB of the Xbox 360 and 25GB for the PS3. So a console manufacturer who isn't Sony could definately get away with flash based media at between 8-16GBs until at least 2013 or so. They could also bear some of the costs of the flash discs themselves as the money saved on the console could be used instead to help pay for the media.
The issue with online downloads is that the retailers would get cut out of the game revenue stream and they lose their major incentive to stock consoles in the first place. A ticket to get people into the store. A kiosk system has similar issues because they don't have to be placed inside the retail stores they can be placed anywhere. So whether a download option is offered or just a kiosk system. Both may have a problem with retailer acceptance.
Shifting away from the optical drive would allow a console manufacturer to make a console which is less noisy, less prone to breaking down and simpler to manufacture. They could get away with using less ram, and the unit itself would have a far lower fixed cost as the major component costs would be elecrical and not mechanical.
The flash industry itself gets bigger every year. The manufacturing cost and the cost of the flash itself is constantly going down every year. By the time the next generation of consoles come out many of the fabs in the world would be due to switch to the 450nm wafer process which will make the marginal cost per mm^2 per chip dive considerably. Now the space requirements for games is somewhere between the current 6.8GB of the Xbox 360 and 25GB for the PS3. So a console manufacturer who isn't Sony could definately get away with flash based media at between 8-16GBs until at least 2013 or so. They could also bear some of the costs of the flash discs themselves as the money saved on the console could be used instead to help pay for the media.
The issue with online downloads is that the retailers would get cut out of the game revenue stream and they lose their major incentive to stock consoles in the first place. A ticket to get people into the store. A kiosk system has similar issues because they don't have to be placed inside the retail stores they can be placed anywhere. So whether a download option is offered or just a kiosk system. Both may have a problem with retailer acceptance.
If Apple introduced a pure gaming device with download only a couple of years ago they may have had a hard time, if they did now I am not so sure. If Nintendo, MS or Sony did it today and the device came pre-loaded with some games I think it would do well. Not very likely though that it would be game-only device it would probably also have music and film capability to give it a broader appeal. Heck, why not also throw in a gps, camera and phone while your at it.
I don´t expect the PSP2 to have 20 GB size games, maybe the PSP3 and then we are about ten years down the road. Talking about wired lines I don´t think 8 Mb/s is that bad, you could download a pretty big game over night and in the future games may be split to allow download in the background like Barbarian suggested.
Sony certainly has incentive to encourage the use of BD players, the other ones not so much I think. It will be really interesting what media Nintendo chooses for the Wii HD. I don´t take it for granted that they will go for a BD player.
Mechanical parts get worn out and are more keen to break, so I think they all would be happy to leave out the diskdrive if possible. The cheap flash memory is what made it possible to remove the UMD drive in the upcoming PSP. The optical drive in the stationary consoles may meet the same destiny if they are able to postpone the introduction of next generation long enough.
My perspective is not before the end of 2013.
Either the current generation is the transitional phase (where download and an optical drive exist in parallel) or the next one will be. I don´t rule out either of the alternatives.
That seems excessive costing to me. What does it cost to add a DVD drive to PS2 or Wii? Half the entire manufacturing cost?! A drive is c. $10, which means $30 of ancillary extras to hit your $40 price point. Now BRD isn't so cheap, but it will be. The saving on PS4 will be little more than the saving of losing a DVD drive in XB360 say, and I don't think that would have dropped the price of XB360 from $300 to $200 at launch. Every bit of profit margin helps, but i don't believe cost is heavily against the optical drive. Especially if you factor in creating a kiosk infrastructure. Although that could be reclaimed as savings in hard-media distribution.
Yes, I can see it working for a handheld now. We may even see it with PSPSlim'n'Lite++.
But next-gen games will have, and that's the problem here!
Well where I am, heavy use between 6pm and 7 am is thereabouts is pushed onto slow lines, so you don't get 8 megabit. I expect 100 KB/s tops on an overnighter, which would take 22 hours for 8 GBs. It's better to download during the day, but of the ISPs don't like people's behaviour, they'll cap it. I think mainstream large downloads will take a couple of days to get realistically on current systems and services, though episodic delivery may hide a lot of that. There'd need to be considerable shake-up of broadband delivery for the majority of users to get complete downloads in a few hours.
I think the next gen will be the real transition. On average, things happen slower than could be hoped for. 65nm PS3 anyone...
That sucks big time. I can´t believe that your ISP gets away with that kind of behaviour, it sounds like you live in Russia, but I know you don´t.
They better shape-up or else they will be by-passed by 3G-networks. Here we just got cheap 3G subscriptions with unlimited downloads. I know people who already replaced their wired broadband. If you live fairly close to a mast the speeds are certainly better than yours.
3G cost the earth not long ago. I don't know what prices are like now, but as I understand it they're still astronomcal. That is, a few GB's of download will by noticed on the bank balance. And I don't know that bandwidth is any better wireless either. I may be completely wrong though, and await correction
I didn't miss the point. The sun will rise tommorrow is also a point, doesn't mean it needs to be mentioned. We all know that at some point downloading full games onto a game console will become mainstream. The question is how long will it take for disc-based games to be phased out for this to happen. The answer to that is not 4 years.
I see this whole thing to be analogous to trying to phase out gas stations + petroleum fuel based cars in favor of home plugin electric cars.
I'm one of those people who don't use landlines anymore. I've been using 3G for over a year and with a really good signal I get around 800Kbps, however, there's a 5GB/month cap which if I go over I get throttled. In 3-4 years 4G will be in all major cities and the caps will likely be higher but still be in place. I'm not really sure I'd want to go over my monthly cap just to download a single game.
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@ Shifty: Its more an initial cost saving rather than an EOL cost saving to cut the drive IMO. Its essentially a balance of cheaper console vs more expensive media whereas over time the media and optical drive/licensing would get cheaper and cancel out somewhat.
Sure, the current gen consoles are not going away anytime soon I would be a fool to believe that.
Yeah the old car park will not be replaced over night, I totally agree.
Telenor recently introduced a 3G subscription deal corresponding to $US 30 a month with unlimited download and no down throttle over a certain limit. I didn´t believe it at first but it´s not bogus. I expect the competitors to follow suit soon.I'm one of those people who don't use landlines anymore. I've been using 3G for over a year and with a really good signal I get around 800Kbps, however, there's a 5GB/month cap which if I go over I get throttled. In 3-4 years 4G will be in all major cities and the caps will likely be higher but still be in place. I'm not really sure I'd want to go over my monthly cap just to download a single game.
Well, unless the next-gen consoles are to come with 3G/4G and a subscription, it still doesn't solve the issue of limited broadband infrastructure to support a worldwide download-only console.
Well, unless the next-gen consoles are to come with 3G/4G and a subscription, it still doesn't solve the issue of limited broadband infrastructure to support a worldwide download-only console.
No, but the optical disk drive may go away independent of the broadband connection.
Well my point was ROM cart will get larger. It was way behind when PSX successfully introduced CDs and PS2 DVDs. But NDS actually fend off UMD. Their size only doubles every generation. Previously they only double something small, in Megabits, but now they are doubling something larger like in Megabytes, then Gigabytes and so on. They don't need to match 50 GB BR, but if they managed 8-16 GB ROM cart, it can work.
Games sizes hasn't grown as expected, Xbox360 still managed with DVDs. So I expect next gen will probably be about double the DVD for average games. I am not expecting consoles to go to 1 TB optical.
16 GB Flash is actually price reasonably now days. Eventually I expect them to cost like 2 GB Flash that is pocket change. Sure it won't be as cheap as optical disc, which is less than 50 cents to press, but given the transfer speed advantage I reckon it's worth it to pay a few dollars extra.
Consoles benefit too from not having optical disc. This discussion was raised from the fact that optical is too slow for next gen. It took ages just to install or start the game.
The company that might moved back to ROM cart is probably Nintendo. They never like optical to begin with. MS might go with no optical because they don't want to support the adoption of Bluray. Sony is the least likely to go with no optical drive since I think they want people to buy Bluray movies at the very least.
8-16GB ROM will always be more expensive than 25GB BR unless some breakthrough happens. Also NDS was able to fend off PSP because UMD basically failed among other things. NDS ROM carts didn't do anything to help "beat" PSP, it was just along for the ride.
Sure but 25GB BR will still be cheaper than 16GB flash.
Even 2GB SD card is more expensive than a BR ROM. Good luck waiting for 16GB SD cards to reach BR ROM prices.
Even if it's too slow it's still a viable storage medium so all you'd need to do is install the contents onto a HDD or some other type of fast drive.
I honestly can't see Nintendo going to ROM. The Wii is using DVD which is dirt cheap and there's no ROM that will be as cheap with similar capacity. MS could save money by offering an optional proprietary optical drive, requiring game installation onto a HDD but I doubt it. The optical drive will likely be built-in even if it's too slow to run the game directly from the disc.
Wont faster Blu Ray drives offer a corresponding speed increase to keep up with what we have today? This is the way optical drives have progressed in the past. Loading seems to stay about the same from generation, you get more ram, but a faster optical drive. The ratio stays about the same through CD, DVD, and now Blu Ray.
IE, sure, you'll have 8X the RAM to fill in next gen, but wont an 8X (+/-) Blu Ray take care of it? Or are those too expensive?
IE, sure, you'll have 8X the RAM to fill in next gen, but wont an 8X (+/-) Blu Ray take care of it? Or are those too expensive?
This interview backs up Groo/Charklie 's prediction about the possibility of Apple entering the market.
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