I'm skeptical of switching all-digital. The internet still isn't constant or reliable enough to be fully depended on (we're expecting to start having internet "brown-outs" pretty soon), whereas we'll always have a disc. But I do think he's right, we'll be all-digital sooner or later. | |
I hope that it turns out like this. I know a certain people prefer to download games online, but I've always liked having a physical copy more. | |
I'm at University in Halls. I can't torrent, I can't access Steam or Xbox Live. Rapidshare and Megaupload take hours to process a webpage - never mind the actual download. Sorry, but some of us don't have access to 'unrestricted' superspeed broadband. I'll stick to my physical media. That, and I love the smell of a new game manual when you take it out of its box the first time. And the special edition metal boxes. And the little figures you get sometimes. And actually owning a CD rather than relying on a program. Don't get me wrong, I like Steam and I've made a few purchases off it (Left 4 Dead (a game I adore) being one of them), but physical media will always be a viable choice simply because it's reliable and it's yours. Also: In before Khell :P | |
I like having the disk so I can re sell it if I think it's a shitty game. | |
There are good things about going all digital, but there are technical hurdles still to go through. The lack of broadband is a good point, and having physical copies are quite nice. I also like Rockstar's philosophy, it makes a nice compromise until all the kinks in the digital distribution scheme to be ironed out. Just imagine if you have 25 games on your console's HD, just to have the HD die on you. That shit would take weeks to redownload (assume 4 gigs each game, 100 gigs total). | |
I like having disks though... it makes it feel more real. I feel much more excited when I get a new physically copy of a game then when my download completes. | |
What a load of bollocks. Many still prefer boxed games, and considering games are even now in-excess of 15GB in size, hardly anyone's going to want to download them. Then there's consumer rights which I assume when everything's done digitally and never sees physical form will be very hard to enforce properly. Oh, and does anyone else think that guy looks like the devil? | |
Me too. It's like the way I prefer CDs of music to iTunes - they cost the same, and you can play them in the car! Not to mention the piracy - everyone would lose out in the long run (Game companies losing money, illegal gamers having internet cut, etc.). | |
"Microsoft will be the first to make the jump when it does happen." Doesn't the psp go not have a disk drive? | |
What's a brown out? I sounds like a toilet cleaning fluid. | |
Basically the internet will stop working for a while because it's too full. I don't have time right now to find the article, but 2012 was the estimate for when this may happen, if I recall correctly. | |
So...the tubes will get clogged?
Perhaps he meant consoles rather than handhelds? | |
Oh, so that's what them Mayans were talking about. Ten years is a lot, I mean, look at where the internet was ten years ago, and look at it now. I'm pretty confident that what Mr. Moore here is saying is what is going to happen. | |
This doesn't say anything. 10 years is a long time in computer terms. Think of the difference in computing from 1990 to 2000, or even in storage tech from 2000 to 2010. In the past few years, reusable disks with no moving parts have become consumer affordable, along with massively available distributed computing (cloud services). A significant amount of people who want to take the effort can already host their digital data across various things like Google's hosting services and Amazon's EC2/S3 services. We have another 10 years to improve on both our network availability and storage strategies. The tech will be there, and it will be affordable soon after. There will always be people who can't access or afford a given tech, but that number goes down with time and cheaper production. People will always have the option for local backups. The same way you have an option to get a tape drive for backups now if you're so inclined. It just will fade to the background as more cheap budget level devices are able to ship without expensive and power hungry storage media. Also, tangentially, a lot more people would have cheap broadband (in the US at least) if we were able to lock down Internet services as a utility to stop cable companies from walking all over customers with their pseudo-monopoly on the service. | |
No, the big truck will be full of things that someone has just just dumped something on. With all this Project Natal garbage though, I reckon Peter Moore might be right. Ten years seems a bit soon but then again, look back at the last ten years. Who knows? | |
I like having the physical media. What might be interesting is having a harddrive that downloads the games in the stores when you pick up peripherals or pre-orders and shit. That way, people who don't have broadband can get the games the same way those who do have broadband do. I don't know if that even made sense. I'll elaborate later when I have time. | |
Of course everything will go digital distribution only. I mean, look at the massive success of the PSPgo. Oh, wait... | |
I don't doubt it will happen, but don't expect me to cheer it on when it does. | |
You know, Funk, you forgot the best quote from Moore. IGN's article has it: "Look at the platform we're on, it's a burning platform," Moore stated. "Burning." See what he did there? Whereas digital downloads are more DRM-able supposedly kinda (not really). | |
I prefer disks, because they seem more reliable and permenant. I still have my old Creatures and Sims 1 games (which I am currently hunting down all the expansion packs for, just for nostalgia sessions) Say they release L4D2, for example, as a completley digital medium. Sure, I can deal with that. But years from now, when I've moved away, gotten a job, forgotten all my accounts for these games and my Steam and whatnot, and I'm suddenly sitting there on a lazy saturday afternoon and think "Christ I'd love to fire up L4D2 one last time..." What would I do? You could say the same about loosing a disc, but with a disc, I may pack it up and take it wherever I go, or I'd put it somewhere safe in any case, where I would eventually find it. God I miss The Sims... ...SCREW IT...I'M INSTALLING THE SIMS DELUXE EDITION AFTER TEA | |
An all digital download future would mean that everyone has access to a fast and affordable broadband internet service. I don't see that happening in a decade. (At least not in my area of the country.) As for me, I prefer physical media because it is something tangible that gives me a greater sense of ownership. A digital download cannot replace the excitement of opening up a new game package and perusing through the manual (all the while experiencing that distinctive new game smell). | |
Next gen consoles: Slightly bigger, £500 starting price, drops to £300 when no-one touches them. Almost exactly the same as they have been since the VCS. Root's tuppence worth. | |
He's absolutely wrong. It'll always exist because not everyone has access to broadband. When it becomes affordable, maybe, but do you think EVERYONE has the ability, let alone the balls enough to use their credit card to purchase a game online even if the service becomes affordable? Retail presents a safer alternative. So yeah, for the most part, he's running his mouth. | |
All digital means all inclusive to itself. You will have to pick what you want where, or buy it multiple times. Until we can have some sort of identity for ALL digital things with which we can buy from and download to anything free after bought, real media will remain, and for that, we would have to have these companies work together. (Fat chance) | |
He has a Halo 2 tattoo. His argument is invalid. Anyway, no, I disagree. Even though more and more people are connected to the internet, the speed issue remains. Not everyone has a connection faster than 1MB, and with that it still takes hours to download a DVD sized game. That's why I bought Half-life 2 retail. When people pay something, the want it now. Sooner or later we will have digital distribution only, but not in the next generation of consoles. That's still too soon. | |
I hope there will always be "physical media". Sorry, but I happen to like owning the disc (cartridge, etc...). First off, it means less space being used on the HD. Don't trust CC on computers yet either. Not to mention job loss in periphery to the video game market (game store clerks, printers, etc...) Yeah sure, publishers love it (less cost to them = more profits), but I don't think the general public is quite on board yet. I'm just going to stay off of the Digital Distribution bandwagon, probably forever. FInally, Microsoft will be first? Ahem*cough*PSPGo*cough*hack... | |
Nah, I'm keeping my Discs, they are much more convienient and don't involve credit card crap. | |
Like many others, I enjoy physical media more. It's nice to have something tangible that won't disappear in a client or server crash. I don't know how it would be possible, but imagine if Steam up and died. Millions of people would have lost massive amounts of money. Plus, without a credit card, I can't buy stuff online anyway. I like going to a real place to buy a real object with real money. | |
This really unnerves me because it will end the home game libraries. I've been collecting and keeping my games since the Atari 7800 are people looking forward to never having a physical copy in case a server goes down, a service goes out of business, their hard drive needs to be replaced, or the emergence of a new game generation? think of all the games you've bought over the years that are sitting on your shelf.. NES, SNES, N64, Playstation, playstation2... reminders of where money went, are folks ok with losing their whole library every 5-8 years? I mean, imagine if all the games you bought for your current console are stored on a hard drive, and a new console comes out, how will your games transfer over? Will the Console producer store every game every company develops on their own server in case the developer/publisher goes out of business? what if your hard drive crashes after a few years and you still want to play a game you bought every now and then, will the game still be available to re-download for years or are you out of luck? There are so many issues with digital-only media that make this prospect very unappealing, especially when people dump so much money into the hobby and have nothing to physicly show for it or the possibilty of losing it one way or another.
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Yeah, the apple app store was a total failure. | |
This is what I fear most out of an all-digital system. Not just that, but there is always the (admittedly nostalgic) appeal of having a physical copy of the game in your hands. I already miss the days of a good instruction manual, I just hope they don't also rob us of the hard copy as well. | |
the net is getting slowed down by so much garbage and other bad things , they would have to shut it down and clean up the mess , then restart | |
This and i like to watch tv not be online all day. (MOAR then i already am....) | |
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Peter Moore: Physical Media Has Another Decade Left
EA Sports chieftain Peter Moore doesn't know if the next generation of consoles will have actual physical disk drives.
Speaking at this year's PLAY Conference during the "The Monetization Game" panel, former-Microsoft-now-EA-Sports boss Moore (and Guitar Hero designer Kai Huang and ngmoco CEO Neil Young) discussed many of the developing and consistent trends of the industry over the past few years.
Moore wondered if gamers were becoming fed up with various plastic peripherals, doubting how long the industry could sustain the trend, saying that if people stopped buying Guitar Hero, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick would find himself on a mountain of half the world's plastic.
On the other hand, plastic tangible peripherals aren't exactly something you can acquire through digital distribution - one of the other growing trends in the industry. After mentioning that he had recently bought a ROKU box to download movies at his home, Moore was asked when he thought physical media would go the way of the dodo:
"[The industry is] at least a decade away from saying goodbye to a physical disc. The more important question is what does the next generation of console look like?" answered Moore - in other words, will the next consoles have physical disc drives, or just rely on connections to the Internet? Either way, he thinks Microsoft will be the first to make the jump when it does happen.
It's extremely hard to imagine a potential next generation without disc drives. Not only would that inhibit the devices' potential to act as secondary media players, but it would only limit the device's appeal to those with a broadband internet connection. Sure, it might seem like everyone and their parents has broadband these days, but that isn't actually the case. Furthermore, whichever company does go straight-to-digital would probably need to have backups and assurances that if it ever goes under, people can still access their games.
If anything, I think the next generation will follow the philosophy espoused by Rockstar founder Dan Houser over the release of GTA IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony: Everything will be online and digital for those who want to go that way, but it'll also come in a physical box for everybody who doesn't want to hop on the digital bandwagon.
(Kotaku, via Videogamer)
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