nanarchy said:
Aielyn said:
VanceIX said:
tiffac said:
Well good for you guys in 1st world countries if physical media dies, bad for us 3rd world countries with f@cked up internet infrastructure and services.
Can't these games just fit a microSD or something instead of a disc base media? |
50gb of game would need a 64gb microSD, which are ungodly expensive.
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They're not THAT expensive.
http://www.dhgate.com/wholesale/64gb+sd+card.html
64 GB microSD with adapter, packaged, and when bought in bulk, costs as low as $4.19 per microSD. And in the meantime, fastest read speed of the BluRay drive in the PS4 is 27 MB/s... this speed cannot be increased in any PS4 unit currently created, and thus all games developed must be built with this speed in mind, even if a PS4 revision has a faster drive. On the other hand, SD speeds are limited by the card itself, and thus games that don't require fast load can save costs by being a lower class, and as costs reduce, higher speeds can be produced without needing update to the system hardware.
The cost of media was a big issue 10-20 years ago, which is why CD/DVD became such a popular medium for video game distribution. It wasn't so much a problem for the high-volume, AAA games, where cost of development were much higher than the cost of manufacturing, but it was problematic for the smaller games...
Now, we have digital distribution for those smaller games. We no longer need to be concerned with that end of the scale. And keep in mind that we're talking about regular SD/microSD, which is a writable medium... it would presumably be cheaper to manufacture non-writable ROM cards (which I believe is within the SD card specifications).
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yep, I think we missed a huge opportunity this gen to completely ditch optical disks, perhaps if the gen was a year later. when you don't have to optimise a card for writing the cost of the card significantly reduces and in bulk SD would be a viable medium and enable far better future proofing for game sizes and speed requirements. BR cost sony a lot, and not just currently, they wrote some huge cheques to get other movie studio's to switch sides to BR and spent a lot on hardware in ps3 and elsewhere to try to push the format.
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We are not there yet. A 25 GB Blu-ray disc (with full-color on disc printing), a case with color insert and shrink wrap costs less than $3/disc in bulk.
http://www.discmakers.com/products/bluray.asp
A 32GB microSD card costs about $8/card in bulk.
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Free-Shipping-Fast-Access-TF-Card-Wholesale-Bulk-Price-Micro-sd-Cards-32GB-64GB-Memory-Card/1856581944.html
If anything, publishers would prefer to go to an all-digital future, but the intranet infrastructure isn't there yet globally.
