Why a digital distribution console is bound to fail.

[NJ5]

bugrimmar said:

 

1.) 7 hours? do you really want to play a game 7 hours after it's released? and like you said this is already fast as hell but that's still a long ass time. your download speed is very very fast.. but yeah, most people would not have anything quite like yours. and in the future, the majority of people will still have much slower speeds than people who can afford fast ones.

2.) re-downloading everything is a pain in the ass. yes, i mentioned that you can re-download everything. i didn't say you'd lose your games forever. i just said that you'd suffer all the frustration of having to A.) buy another hard drive, and B.) downloading everything again which will take days. the worst part of this all is that you have no choice since you are entirely dependent on your hard drive.

3.) no matter how fast internet becomes, it will still pale in comparison to advances in game design, which will be increase in size exponentially faster than download speeds. look how game size has evolved. in the PS era, the standard game would likely go between 300-500mb or so, with big games such as FF7 spilling into a gigabyte or two. in the PS2 era, games went into the 5-9gb games, with some exceeding one dvd. nowadays, you have games like lost odyssey that go into 4 dvds and metal gear solid 4 that can hardly fit into a blu-ray disc.

the trend will always go this way, that games become bigger and bigger as designs get more complex. more pixels in the GT cars. more explosions in the next call of duty. higher resolution textures. 7.1 uncompressed audio. more detailed cities in the next GTA. etc. etc.

no, it's not about FMV. games just get bigger. mgs4 didn't have any FMV at all and it managed to fill up an entire blu-ray disc. all it had was a lot of in-game engine cutscenes. actually, now that i think about it, there are so few games nowadays that have a lot of FMVs that use up a lot of space.

face it. games will get bigger beyond reasonable lengths to download with or without FMV.

1) As I said before, look at the Steam solution - if you're really in a rush and can't wait a few hours for a download, you can download the game before it's released and then it gets unlocked when the release date arrives.

2) Yeah it's a pain in the ass. But it beats losing a game you bought. At least in the DD case you can always rest assured you will have your games. In any case disk failures are not that common, this is not a big deal of a point.

3)As I said, there's a limit to how bigger games can get. HDTV resolutions aren't going to increase for a long time. The biggest games like MGS4 use uncompressed audio (fairly useless for the vast majority of people) or vast amounts of content which few developers can afford to produce. Yeah, textures will get bigger, but processing power increases also make higher compression levels possible (plus procedural textures which in a way is compression too). I don't think games will get nowhere near as big as you said in your previous post anytime soon. I mean what media will those 500 GB games use? Do you really think there will be a new optical format to be used in the next generation?