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SvennoJ on 25 August 2014
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kitler53 said:
SvennoJ said:

And 1 day people will realize what they have lost. Vinyl is regaining popularity, CDs refuse to die, blu-ray sales are still going up although slowly and print books will never disappear. I doubt the cloud will ever fully take over. It works great for things people didn't want to own anyway, physical rental is what's really dying. Netflix and Hulu are mainly competing with cable TV, movie network etc after killing of rentals.

I have no experience with Spotify, I'm happy with CDs and radio. No need to have internet at my pool, damn wifi hardly reaches the living room. The only time I have listened to internet radio was while playing ets2. Driving a truck through Poland feels more immersive while listening to a local radio station.

you have to understand though,.. CDs are a withered technology.  as are vinyls and dvds too.   gaming is still marching along with new tech advances every decade or so.  to invest in creating a console is not a cheap endeavour and costs need to be recouped.  each generation of hardware probably needs to sell at least around 20M units in order to have any chance of recouping costs.

so either:

A) gaming technology improvements halt

B) people continue to buy new hardware at a reasonable rate.

A isn't going to happen.  as soon as B no longer becomes true physical media dies as no company is going to take on losses just to make you feel warm and fuzzy about things.  physical wont' die any time too soon but, like with CDs, the number of releases that aren't availible for purchase in physical format will increase.  stores will continue their trend of only carrying the absolute most popular titles while most content only has a digital release because they can't afford to produce the physical content without taking on extreeme losses.

I don't care if they want to make me feel warm and fuzzy, It's they that care about getting my money. And if they stop with physical releases, so will my money go elsewhere. I'm sure not the only one that switched from pc gaming to console gaming and only buy pc games at extreme discounts nowadays.

If B no longer happens and consoles die, so will digital downloads, and streaming will be the future. Not a future I'm looking forward to.

4K blu-ray will be a good test to see if consumers still care about owning physical copies of movies. 4K streaming has a headstart already. Hopefully it will become at least as popular as Laserdisc. Good enough for me.