Microsoft Dismisses Rumor Of Discless $399 Xbox One, But Should It Exist?

[Normchacho]

Zappykins said:

Normchacho said:

Zappykins said:

Normchacho said:

Zappykins said:...

It's selling very well, it's making them money. Xbox One has an amazing line up this year, it will do fine.

I've said this before and I'll say it again, the infastructure isn't there for a digital console to be successful in the U.S.

The average internet speed in the U.S. is 7.2 mbs. At that speed it would take 16.5 hours to download a 50 gb game. That's a very long time and like I said an average time. 

You aren't wrong in your theory, but the number are a little different in practice.  That may be the average, but dial up really skews the numbesr down, and most of the people will low internet speeds aren't their target demographic.  When the original Xbox came out with it's  ehternet cable, it seems so crazy as, there was no Xbox game ising online yet, most USA households didn't have high speed internet in 2001. 

Tech can change quickly.  As things like Google Fibre start spreading, other will have to adjust.

TL/DR: it's not so bleak as it seems.

You're right that the internet is speeding up over time. My issue is how fast does it need to be before a digital only console makes sense? I average just over 28 mbs which is rather high for the U.S. and a 50 bg game would still take me over 4 hours to download. That's still a long time. 

A digital only console will certainly be viable one day before this generation ends. But not in 2014, or in 2015 for that matter.

I think for many gamers digital distrubuion is already been a viable choice. Think about Steam - it been out for a while, and digital distrubution.  It is also successfull and really began in 2010.

I don't have the fastest internet at all, but it's fairly easy for me to go all digital. Just que a game, and play it next day as a worste case senario.

An average movie from Netflix is about 2.8 gigs per hour of data.  People stream movies like that all the time. 

Movies, music, TV and entertainment is already mostly digital. Why should games be left out in the past?

You're right that there are a lot of gamers who could go fully digital now, but that's still not the norm and releasing a digital only console means that they would just keep breaking the market down into smaller and smaller chunks for themselves.

File size is mostly what seperates games from movies and music when looking at going digital. Even if you were looking at 7th gen games going digital would be a much easier task. It's just that gen 8 games are getting so big.

Of course on top of all this you'd need to convince people that they don't need to own an actual copy of the game and also that they don't need to ever trade in or buy used games. But that's another debate.