A $100 feature is never $100 value overall when bundled with a system which does other things. On average it has to be less than that because otherwise Sony would have completely blitzed Microsoft with their $400 then $300 then $200 etc value Blu Ray drive.
Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech
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A $100 feature is never $100 value overall when bundled with a system which does other things. On average it has to be less than that because otherwise Sony would have completely blitzed Microsoft with their $400 then $300 then $200 etc value Blu Ray drive.
specwarGP2
Regular
They don't own the content, movie studios do and they have no intention of releasing 3D movies on anything other than BD, just like they have no intention to have 1080p content available for DD.
Next gen games are prolly going to be 1080p standard right? It would seem strange that a console which is also supposed to be a media center cannot play the only legitimate delivery vehicle for 1080p and 3D content.
You can download/stream 1080p movies on the 360.
upnorthsox
Veteran
So you can buy it and transfer it off the 360? If not, it's not the same.
I have it on my pc through my zune software . Can I transfer bluray discs off the bluray player ?
Once somethings on my pc I can transfer it to almost anywhere in my house and use it on my tvs or my laptop.
Also I"m pretty sure that most blurays from disney come with a DD copy of the movie that is 1080p .
aaronspink
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And now you know why retail is dying, getting killed by a combination of online physical sales and digital sales. Within 5-10 years, you won't find retail stores selling media at all except for boutiques. Many of the box stores already know this and are trying various methods to shift to it.
Which is fine with the publishers and developers, they'll make more money that way.
BR AND HD are already dead formats. DVD was/is the last great media format.
aaronspink
Veteran
3.5" HD are just as reliable as 2.5" hard drives. The failure modes are the same.
Modern 2.5" drives are in the 70-100 MB/s range. And god forbid if you are perfectly streaming on optical which means you'll be in the KB/s range where drives will still be in the 20-40 MB/s range. The only reason to use a 2.5" HD in a console is space reasons that realistically, its not that bid of a deal.
DD with no resale is ALREADY successful.
Its an extra $20 to $30 per console of unneeded cost.
aaronspink
Veteran
BD is just a physical media. You can already download and stream 3D content.
corduroygt
Banned
People like you said the same thing about music downloads in 2000, yet despite the biggest advantage of music downloads, which is the ability to only download and pay for a couple tracks instead of the whole album, and the file sizes being very small, the ability to carry thousands of songs with you, etc, CD's are still more than half of all music purchases, and that's in the US. Everywhere else DD is FAR less popular. It won't be relevant enough in the next 5 years to go discless. I guess you invested in HD DVD and lost the war just like eastmen and therefore hate blu-ray and Sony with a passion, eh?
As long as they're not being moved around, yes. But notebook drives withstand G forces better, and they're better for portability. They can be powered solely by the USB port for starters.
If by unneeded you mean throwing away more than half of your potential user base, yes it's unneeded.
Not for anything that cost more than $10-20 bucks.
The world is a much bigger place than just the greater SF area, you know this right?
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So someone who isn't buying the fanboy line of massive Blu Ray success now hates Sony with a passion? Interesting projection.
I work in media distribution...DVD is still massively more popular than Blu Ray (which is odd, I'd have thought Blu Ray would be the majority by now, one title I very recently noted shipped about 7:1 in favor of DVD, not drastically different than for titles I checked a year+ ago), but not only that both are falling off a cliff in terms of sales as we speak.
Hell, I read an article in the paper a few weeks ago, which noted Disney was selling Miramax. As an aside, the article noted DVD sales have fallen to such an extent they are already throwing into doubt the value of studios back catalogs!
It's as I've noted for a long time and it's not arguable, Blu Ray is gaining a larger slice of a rapidly shrinking pie.
DD is far less popular everywhere else? LOL yeah right, try selling Blu Ray in China, Latin America, or the rest of the emerging world. I can promise it's even less popular than DD if it exists at all, in favor of digital piracy. You say half of music sales are still on CD, even if it is true it's meaningless, because CD sales themselves are a fraction of what they used to be. Download piracy is the other growth factor. And your assertion of vast disc sales elsewhere is also laughable because again, the emerging markets are buying less discs than anywhere, I doubt disc markets even exist for the most part in say, China (unless it's burned pirate discs). So no, it's actually much worse for disc sales everywhere else.
Depends how you define "DD". Online-only game market in Asia is not only bigger then entire PC Market in US/Europe (DD and retail combined), if current growth continues it will also be outpacing WorldWide console market(software) in a few years.corduroygt said:
Of course, most of this revenue is not from DD game sales, but subscriptions or digital-item sales, but I'd say that still falls under DD.
Perhaps when stationary. However, the bigger mass of 3.5" hardware and the prevalence of contact start-stop head tech makes it more fragile when moved around (bearing damage, headslap etc.)
7200 RPM units maybe reach 100MB/s. You'll "never" see those in consoles though. 4800 or 5400RPM drives are cheaper (and thus slower...)
If you're NOT perfectly streaming?
I remember Jak and Daxter on PS2 streamed quite well off of DVD back in 2004 or whatever...
Criterion streams Paradise City with no hiccups off of BR at 60fps. Seems to work.It's not unneeded.
Most people don't want to wait a week while downloading one single 50GB game so they can play it.
Realistically, physical media CAN'T be done away with for at least another generation. Internet infrastructure - particulary the last bit out to customers - just isn't capable enough.
I'd call that a service rather than DD products. The applications can be distributed via any means, and WOW got onto a lot of subscriber's computers via a boxed disc. Separating subscription service revenues from actual DD products that could be delivered on discs, what are Dd game sales really like?
I think that depends on the buyer. for someone who doesbn't care for BRD, it adds no value. For someone who wants BRD playback, not ahving to buy a $100 standalone player makes it considerably worthwhile.
Value does not always usurp actual cost. Anyone trying to sell me a do-everything device for £1,000, replacing a hundred items at £100 each, won't get any sales despite the value, because if the pennies just won't stretch that far, no matter how much value there is you can't plain afford to buy.
But it could be optional similarly to how HDD is optional for xbox.
you have fast internet? - grats, you just saved a few bucks!
you have slow internet? - too bad, stick with waiting a few hours for downloads or shell out a few bucks to get optical drive.
It's theoretically even possible to have the consoles use the disk drive attached to your PC and stream data over LAN, though if not done right it could make pirating games a bit too simple.
Preloading and streaming in background works really great. WoW is an open-world MMO and latest cata beta is playable after downloading about 2GB out of nearly 20. Yea, it'll mean you will have a few pop-ups and potentially longer loading times when you teleport to other end of the world but it still works. Similarly as both Valve and Blizzard have shown preloading works great as well. You could have people download tens of GB's weeks before launch and have them activate the game the moment it's released, possibly by having them download the final patch of a few MBs. For me personally this would be far better than having to get a disc from a retail shop and possibly waiting for it to do an install to HDD to make loading faster anyway.
If it takes a week to download 50G game it means you use around 80kB/s 24/7. If you limit the download time to 24h you'll need around 4Mbit/s connection. If you can start playing after 2GB is downloaded and you have 4Mbit download you can start playing around 1h15min. It takes me longer to get to shop, buy the disc and get back home
Yes, you can't go 100% DD but you could have it as main way of distribution with optional optical media.
I agree with what was said earlier: biggest problem with going to DD distribution model is that it will be much harder to sell the consoles on retail when retailers won't be getting a whole lot of software sales once people have bought the hardware.
corduroygt
Banned
http://hollywoodinhidef.com/2010/07/blu-ray-grows-112-through-june/
I'm not a Blu-ray fanboy or anything, but it's a successful format and still growing. It's the preferred choice for owning movies, while I see DD's advantages for renting them.
Wait...so you include piracy with DD? Then of course it's the most popular distribution method in the world since it has no DRM and it's free
As far as revenue generation, paid DD has no chance of exceeding Blu-ray, which is slowly replacing dvd, because good luck trying to make the pirates pay for the same thing they're getting for free. At least with a disc, the cost is justified with the better quality and owning a physical product, so even the pirates sometimes would buy them.Unlike some people I reply to here (not you), I don't post without having proof:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/01/cd-sale-free-fall-continued-in-2009/
10+ years on the market plus the incredible price advantage of downloading individual songs vs. CD's, and none of the technical issues that come with huge file sizes and it's still at 40%, and that's US only. I can guarantee everywhere else, far less songs are sold through itunes or amazon in favor of piracy.
Paid DD in those markets is non-existent, because there's the free alternative. If you look at revenue generation, Blu-ray discs have a better chance than DD since they differentiate themselves from pirated material by owning a tangible product that's also higher quality.
I'm still trying to catch up with this long thread, but I honestly don't see how anyone can disagree with optical being needed. If you want to reach the broadest audience possible, then yes optical is needed.
On top of the reduced possible audience, you also have old school stubborn gamers like me who prefer to have a physical disc that I can claim full ownership over instead of a digital download that would probably be infected with DRM and still controlled to an extent by the publisher.
I don't see next gen dropping optical media, the gen following that though, it's quite a possibility.
Its more complicated than that. Its also about eggs in baskets (fear of loss), less utility given theres no remote and you can't use say movie playback and gaming at the same time whereas with two devices you can and the general acceptance of the idea of using a console as a media centre.
It works for a car manufacturer. You get a status symbol, reproduction location, sound stage and transportation in the one device. Anyway, funny talk aside most people who play games nowadays are 18+ and if they cannot afford a console then they probably can't afford the games. This generation has proved pretty conclusively that people will pay for an experience they value.
Oh and how about something funny:
How does it sound to have multiple different X86 cores on the same die? I.E. Have one Bulldozer module in order to kick amdahl's law in the pants for code which simply will not parallelize and bobcat for low power / relatively small cores for code which does. Bobcat is meant to be 90% Athlon X2 performance on 50% of the area with a very low TDP.
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