CaptainExplosion said:
But do you see the point I made? Not enough consumers are willing to buy a digital only console. |
Just like not enough consumers were willing to purchase the first cellphones with a camera, the first smartphone, the first tablet, Steam had a really slow and bumpy start, electric cars were a fad the first time the showed up, the first digital cameras were too expensive, had poor storage and inferior objectives etc. If someone says "object or solution x is the future", you can't simply point to current consumer habbits and claim that the statement is false.
There is already a massive movement towards digital, movies, TV series and music have made the transition and optical media make up for a small percentage now, but the digital alternatives had a slow start. Games are harder, they take up more room and require faster connections to download in a reasonable amount of time, but connection speeds are increasing all the time, even phones have access to 50-80Mbit networks out of the box now, and storage solutions are becoming bigger and cheaper by the month, my 500GB SSD would have cost 5-6 times as much only 3-4 years ago. Not to mention game-streaming, which is about to become a viable option as well, completely bypassing the storage issues. A connection that can stream 4K images should have no problems streaming the main assets from a big-budget game.
People used the same arguments about HD images that you're using about digital games now, they said it was a non-factor due to a slow start, people were plastering the forums with the statistics on blu-ray sales vs DVD and having a merry old time and taking about how immensely long it would take for HD TV's to ever become standard and how the upgrade was also not necessary to begin with. And here we are. Same thing was about digital music when MP3 rolled around, poor sound quality, shoddy (and illegal) services, bad compression and poor compatibility. Solutions arrived in time and things changed and the market never looked back.
Bottom line; saying that consumers do not have a habbit today does in no way disarm arguments claiming that they might in the near future. The mainstream consumer changes habbits pretty quickly when they come around, and they leave existing solutions and platforms really quickly as well.
Edit; smartphone and tablet games are digital only, they're pulling in billions and billions of dollars every year, so it's not like consumers aren't willing to embrace a fully realized and streamlined digital-only platform. Yes, traditional games are more complex but the point still stands.
