spemanig said:
Here's why it's a dumb move. An all digital platform does "usable on both plaforms" undebatably better while, instead of costing devs significantly more for an identical port with absolutely no benefits to merit, allowing developers to profit more from an identical port and have the game perform better than a game running from either discs OR carts. *gasp* :O |
As people have been saying, over and over again, in this thread, every single poll ever done has indicated that people want retail options. The few times that digital-only has been attempted on a dedicated gaming system, it has flopped massively. The only way that digital-only works is when it's on hardware that also enables a broad variety of other uses... in other words, PC, phones and tablets. And have you noticed that the AAA games are released on PC as an afterthought in most cases?
Do you know how they can do retail and digital in a way that makes a solid balance? It's really simple - the cost of the disc/card/etc are added to the retail price, with the understanding that the upside to paying the extra cost (other than not needing the hdd, not having to use up internet quotas, etc) is that you can share games (since the card/disc can be removed from one system and taken to another one).
If the cost of cards is such an issue, the 3DS would have been in big trouble, since they do cost more per GB than discs.
You can assert that all-digital would be smart, but I've yet to hear any person actually address any of the above. The ONLY benefits to digital are easy access (no need to switch out discs or cards) for the consumer and increased publisher margin per sale.
But the downsides are plentiful - reduced accessibility*, inability to share, issues with retail hardware support and used games**, diminished impulse purchasing***, lower market activity, fewer ways to obtain products resulting in reduced competition, the potential drowning out of indies, difficulties around games that require specific or special peripherals, the inability to physically give games as gifts for birthdays/christmas, no way to do proper special editions, a difficulty distinguishing between game and DLC, reduced free-advertising (another benefit of retail stores)... I can continue, if you'd like.
Incidentally, flash memory is faster than typical HDDs - that's why SSDs exist, after all. What slows optical disc drives down is the need to physically move the read head to the location of the next bit of data, so unless the data is all sequential, it's slowed down. HDDs suffer the same problem, albeit to a slightly lesser degree. Solid state technology, including flash memory and SSDs, don't have this issue.
*not everyone has easy access to internet of sufficient speed and a sufficiently large quota.
**Gamestop doesn't want to sell only hardware, they want to sell software, it's where they make their money - but the hardware makers need to actually sell their hardware somehow.
***people are far more likely to impulse buy at stores, whereas they can always wait a few hours, a few days, a few weeks when they're at home.
