No Physical Media for Next Gen?

[EricHiggin]

CaptainExplosion said:

Barkley said:

Even with just 10mbit broadband you'll download a 100gb game in under 30 hours.

I imagine most people who purchase physical copies order them online too from Amazon or another online retailer, so unless you have next-day (e.g. prime) it'll take longer to get the physical game delivered then it will to download it even on a slow internet connection.

The wait is only longer compared to buying in-store.

Datacaps are an issue for countries that have them, UK doesn't really.

Do Canada or the United States have datacaps?

Sure do. We usually have the option of unlimited for a higher cost. In rural Ontario Canada I can get 5.0mbps down and 0.5mbps up for either $35 per month at a 300GB cap, or $45 per month unlimited. It's usually another $10 or so for unlimited no matter the plan. The bigger ISP's seem to charge like $5 to $10 more per month with 50GB-100GB less data. We also typically get free data overnight, like from 1am to 7am. So I could download a 100GB file every night, all week and get most of the data free. I wish the PS4 had a timer option for downloading.

Buying from Amazon or Best Buy, etc, typically takes a couple days, or a week at most, but I'm also within a couple hours of the main distribution centers. I'm also a couple km's from a recently laid fiber line that fed the small town nearby. That medium sized ISP, like most others, are laying fiber from town to town first, then wiring everything in between eventually. Problem is Canada is one huge landmass, which means as close as I may be to a gigabit fiber line, I'm decades away from seeing it at my door. Very little, if any construction get's done in the 4-5 months during the winter.

The large ISP's, who own all those in between lines, aren't going to do anything for us either. Just getting something fixed is a nightmare. Recently on the news it was announced that Bell is going to spend billions and years upgrading Toronto to full fiber gigabit internet, all at an affordable rate with higher caps, when they already have 10X better internet than everyone else in Ontario. Bell, who own's the in between lines around here, only upgraded to 5.0mbps dsl about 5 or 6 years ago, and only added the bandwidth necessary to feed that speed continuously without heavily throttling, just this year.

Streaming and digital downloads are the bogeyman to me and most of my gaming friends.

Last edited by EricHiggin - on 13 November 2018