Wii Succesor and Future Will Use Physical Media

[Squilliam]

Untamoi said:

Squilliam said:

Joelcool7 said:

 

I'm not suprised Nintendo will stick with physical formats. I mean seriously the next gen games will be like 50-gig downloading those suckers would be costly and not be efficient. I don't think digital downloads will become mainstream as long as game companies continue to advance the amount and quality of content they provide.

Lets face it no AAA game is going to be efficiently downloaded.

50GB? Jeez.

Thats decidedly unrealistic especially given the fact that publishers have already decided to target direct download as an important means of distribution. There are many games which look considerably better than almost all current generation console titles on the PC which use less than 10GB and thats with duplication of texture data to support various settings.

But there are also dozens of PC titles which use over 10GB. Getting past 10GB is completely normal nowadays even on PC. Age of Conan is probably biggest PC title and it used over 30GB (no wonder it was never released on 360). Download isn't the same as actual game size after decompression. Even World of Warcraft requires 25GB now, according to Blizzard.

Only a rare game will need more than 20GB of this I am certain. Only the art assets will scale towards the next generation and this is tempered by the fact that games will make increasing use of real time global illumination as soon as performance allows it as well as procedural generation. The texture budget of Fallout 3 for instance is only 2.3GB so even if you increased that 5 fold you're still not even hitting 20GB if you next genify that one title.