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Plaupius on 06 August 2008
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TheRealMafoo said:
Plaupius said:
Ok, here's what I predict will happen within the next 10 years:

1) Internet coverage will only increase, and increase dramatically.

2) Internet speeds will increase a lot, both for consumers and for the backbones. New cables will be laid between continents and within the next 10 years, the bandwidth will increase at least a hundredfold. In Japan, apparently, gigabit internet connections have been available for a few years already.

3) All content delivery will shift to digital domain. For games, this means very radical changes in the business as a whole. I've talked about some of this before, but the main points are:

3a) Retail will no longer get as much profits from game sales, so HW and accessories will have to make up for the loss of profits, meaning higher margins and more expensive hardware.

3b) Content delively margin structure changes with the removal of distribution/retail from the delivery chain, so the price of content should come down quite a bit.

3c) Episodic delivery of content will become more and more mainstream, both to manage risk within big projects, and to get to profits quicker. This also means that even if the average size of games continues to increase, the episode sizes will still be easily manageable.

3d) The roles of developers/publishers will change, and more and more devs will bypass publishers as they can access the customers directly via the digital distribution channels.

 

So in 10 years, we will be where we are today with Sony's media. In 10 years, a disk will probably hold a terabyte or two. Physical media will always be ahead of downloads when it comes to space.

The only thing I can see where media becomes obsolete, is when we get to a point where you never have the game. You buy the X-box 5, or the PS 6, and you instantly have every game ever made for it, for a monthly fee. the games themselves will sit on a server somewhere, and your console is just a window into that server. Kind of like remote play. The only thing that gets downloaded to your console, is the audio and visuals of the game you are playing, while you play it.

When that day comes (and it will someday), then media is dead. While there is still the need to deliver large amounts of code to consumer, physical media will live on.

What difference does it make is a disk will hold a terabyte in 10 years? Are games or movies going to need that much space then? The simple answer is a resounding NO. It doesn't matter. PC hard drives have been in the hundreds of gigabytes for quite some time now, are PC games that much bigger than console games that have had to fit in DVD? Nope.

Now, imagine having a gigabit internet connection, which in 10 years time is not far fetched. That's a gigabyte of content rouhgly every 11 seconds (assuming a single parity bit, don't know if that would be the case), or 5.4 gigabytes every minute. More than a single layer DVD in a minute. 10 minutes for a dual-layer Blu-Ray disc. Think about that and tell me it's not going to change the whole game.

Also, a point I forgot from my earlier post is the bigger picture: as content delivery starts to shift to the internet, and it's already begun, then the traditional brick-and-mortar stores are the ones taking the hit. Think about how many music stores selling CD's there are in your city now vs. 10 years ago, the same is going to happen with games and movies. Even if you would like to have physical copies, there won't be as many outlets selling them in 10 years, unless the market itself grows so much it offsets the shift to digital distribution.