Then you have shifted the penalty of that "huge pile", it become a massive amount of data which requires another purchase hence you now have not saved any money and have eliminated a part of the market and the consumer's options.
Why does Xbox One have a Bluray player?
- Thread starter blakjedi
- Start date
Then you have shifted the penalty of that "huge pile", it become a massive amount of data which requires another purchase hence you now have not saved any money and have eliminated a part of the market and the consumer's options.
Blazkowicz
Legend
Funnily there's loads of crap you can't get rid of in a car. What if you want to buy a car without power steering and without A/C if you feel like it?, it's not so much an option.
Overprovisoned stuff in manufacturing happens all the time too, I think you will find that a lot of time there's a chip or feature in $product that sits there, unconnected or disabled in firmware. A totally useless component that was still assembled on the thing. It's pointless, but not putting it there or manually removing it would cost more (I read a fun article about that issue), as you don't want to muck with the assembly line or can't properly predict the proportion of Gizmos GT and Gizmos Deluxe you need built.
Too bad I can't remember the article's title or the way it named the concept
.I hate waste, too ; but I wonder if you can end up polluting more because of doing separate production runs with retooling (or second assembly line/increased capacity), logistics, inventory problems.
The other option is to not buy the product at all, lol.
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Johnny Awesome
Veteran
Here's the rub:
1. Sony and MS need retailers to sell their systems, since online-only hardware sales would kill either of them.
2. Retailers won't sell systems without games to sell to make money.
3. Optical disks are here to stay, for now.
4. Digital can't undercut Retail (see #1, above).
Note: Retailers aren't stupid. They know that moving away from physical media is a death sentence for them. They will fight Sony and MS tooth and nail to stop this from happening.
5. When the network improves enough and cloud computing actually becomes a reality for real time graphics, then local hardware won't matter any more. MS and Sony won't need retailers to sell their hardware anymore. Then full digital will become a reality.
1. Sony and MS need retailers to sell their systems, since online-only hardware sales would kill either of them.
2. Retailers won't sell systems without games to sell to make money.
3. Optical disks are here to stay, for now.
4. Digital can't undercut Retail (see #1, above).
Note: Retailers aren't stupid. They know that moving away from physical media is a death sentence for them. They will fight Sony and MS tooth and nail to stop this from happening.
5. When the network improves enough and cloud computing actually becomes a reality for real time graphics, then local hardware won't matter any more. MS and Sony won't need retailers to sell their hardware anymore. Then full digital will become a reality.
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Johnny Awesome
Veteran
Not if it's the first step toward them selling nothing.
Game "cards" legitimize digital over retail. They aren't going to participate in their own extinction.
Game "cards" legitimize digital over retail. They aren't going to participate in their own extinction.
It's so dead it's going to be here for this next generations life time, that may be as much as 10 years.. And everything is going to be spec'd for it, loading, streaming etc.. same goes for the mechanical drives they decided to build in. Of course with the PS4 there hopefully will be more of an advantage with SSD this round.
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
PS4 has an SSD drive as standard? I didn't know that.
What exactly does 3. mean? Next year? The year after. I expect optical will die a slow death (linger for a decade like vhs), but in 2 or 3 years of this generation the primary delivery mechanism for games will be digital (it already is for PC gaming).
I sure wonder why the xbox one has a bluray drive, didn't they want to follow the PSP-Go revolution? The bluray dying FUD has been going on for years, in multiple threads for the last 6 years. It's sour grapes.
Next gen won't have any drive, for sure.
Holo discs are just around the corner, it's the revolution.
No it'll be flash carts because we don't need all that space.
No it's DD-only because it's the future and everyone will have amazing broadband.
Something other than bluray. It doesn't matter what, we'll adjust the arguments accordingly. Unicorn dust discs, it's the future.
But what about Holo discs? Didn't we talk about holodisc yet?
No, cripple the disc and use them as download accelerator, it's a revolution.
Let start another discussion about DD-only. Why isn't bluray dying, shouldn't it be dying?
Rinse. Repeat. For 6 years.
If Microsoft's vision is a console that does everything (hey, let's party like it's 2006), they need to play discs, according to the leaked vision document, they knew they needed a bluray drive. If the bet with the format war was to somehow kill both formats, it certainly blew up in their face. Now they lick their wounds and put a bluray drive in there. It's just like the DRM fiasco, if the competition is winning, time to revert back the decision and limit the damage. FUD doesn't work anymore, welcome to 2013 where social medias are more powerful than controlled interviews and paid articles.
Next gen won't have any drive, for sure.
Holo discs are just around the corner, it's the revolution.
No it'll be flash carts because we don't need all that space.
No it's DD-only because it's the future and everyone will have amazing broadband.
Something other than bluray. It doesn't matter what, we'll adjust the arguments accordingly. Unicorn dust discs, it's the future.
But what about Holo discs? Didn't we talk about holodisc yet?
No, cripple the disc and use them as download accelerator, it's a revolution.
Let start another discussion about DD-only. Why isn't bluray dying, shouldn't it be dying?
Rinse. Repeat. For 6 years.
If Microsoft's vision is a console that does everything (hey, let's party like it's 2006), they need to play discs, according to the leaked vision document, they knew they needed a bluray drive. If the bet with the format war was to somehow kill both formats, it certainly blew up in their face. Now they lick their wounds and put a bluray drive in there. It's just like the DRM fiasco, if the competition is winning, time to revert back the decision and limit the damage. FUD doesn't work anymore, welcome to 2013 where social medias are more powerful than controlled interviews and paid articles.
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
Maybe. Only if prices come down. I can walk into my local Gamestop and buy GTAIV for $8 right now.
Retailers are going to fight HARD to keep discs alive.
How are MS and Sony going to sell systems without giving retailers a piece of the action somehow?
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
LOL. Most of social media is the very definition of FUD. The sad part is that most people don't even realize it.
Since the PS4 is going to have a replaceable harddrive like the PS3 did there is the possibility of swapping the drive for a SSD drive. With the PS3 there was a bottleneck somewhere, and the usual advantage of a SSD drive didn't come 100% through.
Which is yet to be determined, if you want to learn more you should go here: http://www.eurogamer.net/?topic=digital_foundry i think there is more than one article on the PS3 with a SSD drive.
I'm enthusiastic when it comes to technology in all kinds of categories, but I don't narrowly think forward. I look towards the future and the past to figure out where we can go wrong, and also how we can improve on new standards.
All of that also includes the standards of distribution (physical and digital) for media. The problem with DD for gaming and video is multiple factors that are still changing/moving. Increases in HD resolutions, bigger/complex games, and varying internet connections are just a few reasons.
Disc media OTOH has pretty much stabilized at this point. BDs hold large amounts of data and are cheap to manufacture, the BD drive speeds are faster than they used to be.
Most importantly, it's an issue of redundancy. Having a disc drive completely insures you have a form of distribution on the console end to buy games no matter what. Most people in general have weak internet connections, so keeping disc drives means being able to acquire games with huge data requirements without penalizing them regarding data caps and download speeds.
You have a great internet connection with little chances of outages or slowdowns, but how many people like you exist? How many of you are there to dedicate a new SKU to? Right now that's pretty low so it's not gonna happen anytime soon.
If DD becomes standard, then it will become standard. But being mad because it's not where you want it to be is a pointless waste of energy. Unless you're creating a new cheap high-speed ISP or laws regarding digital purchases, you have no control in the matter.
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Money cards.
I can go online right now and download Assassin's Creed II, for nothing, but seriously how much is gamestop making on that $8 sale that they need to protect it? New release is where the money is at, not 4 year old games. If digital games are the same price as at retail, it's going to win over based on convenience.
Blazkowicz
Legend
Imagine a student dorm where there's crappy wifi retroffited in old buildings, there's a major game release and you have 100 persons trying to download a 40GB game. That's going to be horrendous.
Favourable case, Microsoft allows a (lone, underpaid, incompetent) network admin to set up a proxy with a ridiculous cache (say 1TB) and Xboxen automatically use that. Now you're going to download 40GB from the Internet, not 4TB. But it's still hell for the local network, spectrum is scarce! You'll demolish your wifi. Everyone is going to be pretty pissed off.
Favourable case, Microsoft allows a (lone, underpaid, incompetent) network admin to set up a proxy with a ridiculous cache (say 1TB) and Xboxen automatically use that. Now you're going to download 40GB from the Internet, not 4TB. But it's still hell for the local network, spectrum is scarce! You'll demolish your wifi. Everyone is going to be pretty pissed off.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
At the moment I can buy FIFA on disk for (far) less than as a digital download, and I can take that disk to a friend's, put it in their PS3, and play immediately (barring updates
This is only because console DD is still years behind PC DD (I'd mention phone/tablets but they don't have to deal with shared distribution with optical).
Steam and various online DD stores have shown that DD only software can be discounted at anytime for any reasons. Often MSRP of DD drops before MSRP of physical drops. There's also usually a pre-order discount of between 10-25% off the MSRP depending on title. So launch prices for games don't even have to be more than sale prices of launch optical media.
People generally look to the Summer/Winter sales when they think of discounted DD software, but it happens all year around with discounts on a weekly/daily basis.
BTW - this was happening before Steam had any competition as well, so it's not like it's only happening because they have competition for digital sales.
So there's no reason that Microsoft and Sony can't do the same.
Going point by point.
1. Yes they do, hence no one (at least not me and other people posting about a BRD less version of the PS4/Xbox One) are advocating the complete removal of the BRD this generation.
2. Again, true. DD only distribution still allows retailers to sell games, however. Either through the sale of a redeemable code on a card, or by selling cards to purchase DD content (like Steam cards, PSN cards, Xbox Live cards, etc.). That said, optical distribution still has a place, and neither Microsoft nor Sony can safely ignore it at this time.
3. True again. Noone is advocating the complete removal of the BRD for this generation. Everything I've said is always with the assumption that there is going to be a BRD SKU through this entire console generation with more BRD console sales at the beginning and likely more non-BRD console sales at the end (if a non BRD console is released).
4. False. Steam regularly undercuts retail and has done so since launch. It is just more frequent now that DD represents over half of all PC software sales. There isn't a reason that Microsoft or Sony couldn't do the same. Especially as more and more consumers migrate to DD since that is how they purchase most of their software on PC and all of their software on Phones and Tablets.
Regards,
SB
Just by reading the advertising papers around here physical media represents a big chunk of the space. THe change i see is how much space that is allocated in the stores for old stuff, fast in, fast out is the way it works now. And then they keep the constant sellers in stock, the rest is gone.
It's heavy advertising and it works for both the stores and the console manufacturers. Somehow i doubt that advertising with download codes in the papers will work as good. Its like advertising for the competition.
It's heavy advertising and it works for both the stores and the console manufacturers. Somehow i doubt that advertising with download codes in the papers will work as good. Its like advertising for the competition.
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Blazkowicz
Legend
I remember reading that on Doom's release on 10th december 1993 there were severe Internet outages , like crashed routers, overwhelmed servers, ditto BBSes. Everyone was rushing to download the freely redistributable shareware version. But it's just a mention I once read, dunno how it was.
Another problem you can more easily find testimony of is the network code was really crappy in Doom v. 1.0 and 1.1 - it used broadcast packets - and it would cause big network congestion, on university and corporate networks of course. The networks were crappy I guess, 10 Base5 or 10 Base2 ethernet which didn't improve things.
, like crashed routers, overwhelmed servers, ditto BBSes. Everyone was rushing to download the freely redistributable shareware version. But it's just a mention I once read, dunno how it was.Another problem you can more easily find testimony of is the network code was really crappy in Doom v. 1.0 and 1.1 - it used broadcast packets - and it would cause big network congestion, on university and corporate networks of course. The networks were crappy I guess, 10 Base5 or 10 Base2 ethernet which didn't improve things.