So consumers were given the choice between physical media that you made artificially expensive and overly inconvenient or digital media that you made practically free and ultra convenient. That’s called the illusion of choice. But now you can blame your victims when you abuse them because they brought this on themselves.
It s more nuanced. 80% of buy are digital. Some industries it s worse. Like music and movie. But thoses industry value their “hardcore” consumer and will never shelve their physical release, who also append to be better quality than digital release. Contrary to video game where its litteraly the same product. Nobody has an issue with valve being fully digital cause they can’t lock down other store. What sont does is unprecdent and I pray for their downfall.
Physical media is no more expensive or inconvenient than it ever was. It’s just that you’re now comparing it to downloads, which bear no manufacturing cost and don’t require you to physically go to a store or have the media shipped to you. These are exactly the reasons that consumers prefer downloads.
Up until the Wii era you could just insert the disc in the console and start playing immediately, it was much more convenient than waiting an hour for a game to download and install. You didn’t need to manage disk space as well. Or login before playing. The industry destroyed the convenience.
Now only Switch has an option to start playing from cartridge.
As far as I know, no one has produced technology to make disc streaming faster. You can blame console design for this, but even if an indie dev simulated this situation with a 50GB game containing compressed textures placed on a Blu-ray, he’d have the same design problem - loading things off that disc takes a long time, and installation is a far better user experience.
The Wii gets away with it because texture sizes back then were much smaller. If you can point to technical demonstrations of how the same process could’ve been achieved on modern games with much larger textures, I’d be interested to hear it.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think we ever got to see a dual disk drive console, at least not in production (exempting gaming PCs). Perhaps in a parallel universe on board storage became cost prohibitive and games came on two simultaneously inserted optical disks, one with the game code and the other with texture packs and art. Nothing that interesting could exist in today’s climate.
Cartridges, same as Switch 2. And high res textures and audio as separate download if needed.
Flash memory was getting cheap until AI, 64GB usb 3 drive is still around 10 bucks at retail, so probably 3 bulk, and even cheaper for Sony.
Spinning media will never be as fast, of course, unless every drive comes with a 50GB cache to just load everything once and never seek randomly.
Doesn’t most of the physical media still require downloads to actually play anyway? I don’t own a console but it seems like every time I’m at one of my friends who do and they’re putting a new game in they have to wait on it to install/update or whatever. Maybe it’s just the big AAA ones.
So consumers were given the choice between physical media that you made artificially expensive and overly inconvenient or digital media that you made practically free and ultra convenient. That’s called the illusion of choice. But now you can blame your victims when you abuse them because they brought this on themselves.
It s more nuanced. 80% of buy are digital. Some industries it s worse. Like music and movie. But thoses industry value their “hardcore” consumer and will never shelve their physical release, who also append to be better quality than digital release. Contrary to video game where its litteraly the same product. Nobody has an issue with valve being fully digital cause they can’t lock down other store. What sont does is unprecdent and I pray for their downfall.
Physical media is no more expensive or inconvenient than it ever was. It’s just that you’re now comparing it to downloads, which bear no manufacturing cost and don’t require you to physically go to a store or have the media shipped to you. These are exactly the reasons that consumers prefer downloads.
Up until the Wii era you could just insert the disc in the console and start playing immediately, it was much more convenient than waiting an hour for a game to download and install. You didn’t need to manage disk space as well. Or login before playing. The industry destroyed the convenience. Now only Switch has an option to start playing from cartridge.
As far as I know, no one has produced technology to make disc streaming faster. You can blame console design for this, but even if an indie dev simulated this situation with a 50GB game containing compressed textures placed on a Blu-ray, he’d have the same design problem - loading things off that disc takes a long time, and installation is a far better user experience.
The Wii gets away with it because texture sizes back then were much smaller. If you can point to technical demonstrations of how the same process could’ve been achieved on modern games with much larger textures, I’d be interested to hear it.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think we ever got to see a dual disk drive console, at least not in production (exempting gaming PCs). Perhaps in a parallel universe on board storage became cost prohibitive and games came on two simultaneously inserted optical disks, one with the game code and the other with texture packs and art. Nothing that interesting could exist in today’s climate.
Cartridges, same as Switch 2. And high res textures and audio as separate download if needed. Flash memory was getting cheap until AI, 64GB usb 3 drive is still around 10 bucks at retail, so probably 3 bulk, and even cheaper for Sony.
Spinning media will never be as fast, of course, unless every drive comes with a 50GB cache to just load everything once and never seek randomly.
Doesn’t most of the physical media still require downloads to actually play anyway? I don’t own a console but it seems like every time I’m at one of my friends who do and they’re putting a new game in they have to wait on it to install/update or whatever. Maybe it’s just the big AAA ones.
Only if you have an internet connection active. Otherwise, I believe it’s just insert disc and play, IIRC.