death of the disc?

Not going to happen for, I'd say 10 years but it's a nice little read and it's nice to have a choice even if it is only for a few PSN games, Warhawk, Gran Turismo Demologue and Socom

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3167303

I guess any online game is fine to release as a download as only people who have an Internet connection can play it anyway. My guess is they will do both for a long time, though I cannot see them not releasing games on some other media. They released it on blue-ray as well.

Also have to take into consideration that in 5-10 years time, games could be so large that even high speed connections would take a while to download them.

CGR said:

I guess any online game is fine to release as a download as only people who have an Internet connection can play it anyway. My guess is they will do both for a long time, though I cannot see them not releasing games on some other media. They released it on blue-ray as well.

Also have to take into consideration that in 5-10 years time, games could be so large that even high speed connections would take a while to download them.

Click to expand...

I doubt that, in 7-8 years high speed connections have gotten 10x faster as a standard. example in 2000 we first got ADSL "even cable was the same speed", 150KB/50KB here today standard high speed is 10mbit/1mbit.
.in 10 years everyone will have about 35(low)-50mbit(med.high), 75-100(as very fast) im guessing.

PhysX said:

I doubt that, in 7-8 years high speed connections have gotten 10x faster as a standard. example in 2000 we first got ADSL "even cable was the same speed", 150KB/50KB here today standard high speed is 10mbit/1mbit.
.in 10 years everyone will have about 35(low)-50mbit(med.high), 75-100(as very fast) im guessing.

Click to expand...

Well in the last 8 years since Iv'e went to college I've went from....

2.5MB Down / 256KB Up to 5MB Down / 786KB Up.

Yup huge change, thats on a cable line here, my parents have about the same thing with a different provider

3MB Down / 256KB Up to 6MB Down / 786KB Up.

So over 8 years I've only doubled in speed, and our area isn't nessisary in the boonies, as well its not like the are a poor community by any means. If, and if we double speed in our area every 10 years, be lucky ot see 20MB speeds by 2015, expecially since there is ZERO plans for old subdivisions in our area to get FIOS or any major speed increases in the next few years.

PhysX said:

I doubt that, in 7-8 years high speed connections have gotten 10x faster as a standard. example in 2000 we first got ADSL "even cable was the same speed", 150KB/50KB here today standard high speed is 10mbit/1mbit.
.in 10 years everyone will have about 35(low)-50mbit(med.high), 75-100(as very fast) im guessing.

Click to expand...

Yes, but as you can see there are diminishing returns now. Cable companies are getting near capacity as you can only share so much on one line.

There are technologies like FIOS, however it is fairly slow going with rollout.

bandwidth is not infinite..

CGR said:

bandwidth is not infinite..

Click to expand...

No its not... but as more and more fiber is laid down, and exchanges are replaced bandwidth will continue to grow. Even FIOS is not completely fiber. Somewhere between you and your ISP and your ISP and your destination IP there is still copper... and copper can only hold so much data. Once the copper is swapped out we are only limited by the speed of light.. even then.. give it time until technology figures out a way to circumvent modern physics

Couldn't read that article, because company firewall blocked it out.

I'm not sure that I will prefer DL to the hard copy of the game itself. With hard copy, sometimes I can get cheap deals by buying it off my friends. Otherwise, we can just trade games. With DL, i'm not sure we can do that. The game is pretty much restricted to that specific console. Not too sure if it is going to be a popular option.

I will get to that article when i get home tonight.

joe2000gt said:

No its not... but as more and more fiber is laid down, and exchanges are replaced bandwidth will continue to grow. Even FIOS is not completely fiber. Somewhere between you and your ISP and your ISP and your destination IP there is still copper... and copper can only hold so much data. Once the copper is swapped out we are only limited by the speed of light.. even then.. give it time until technology figures out a way to circumvent modern physics

Click to expand...

It will not be in my lifetime or yours that copper is completely replaced with fiber.

CGR said:

Yes, but as you can see there are diminishing returns now. Cable companies are getting near capacity as you can only share so much on one line.

There are technologies like FIOS, however it is fairly slow going with rollout.

bandwidth is not infinite..

Click to expand...

Actually it is. The same engineers that helped develop the internet are now working on ways to get rid of it for an even faster solution with less bottleneck. You didn't think the cable companies were just going to go into stasis did you?

FudgeNuggets said:

Not going to happen for, I'd say 10 years but it's a nice little read and it's nice to have a choice even if it is only for a few PSN games, Warhawk, Gran Turismo Demologue and Socom

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3167303

Click to expand...

10 years is underestimating the pace of technology. That's like saying Sony's really going to get ten years out of the PS3. They will... in a PS2 sort of way... the PS3 will still be functioning in ten years... and there'll probably be new madden games out for it... but...

Gran Turismo Prologue has already been an outstanding success in Europe and Asia. When it's released in North America it will be an astounding success globally... and that's in about a week aaaaaaand... IT'S JUST A DEMO!

The more success Sony racks up with downloadable distribution the more downloadable full games you're going to see. Hell... in about five years time, once internet speeds improve, absolutely everything will be downloaded. That's the direction everything has been moving towards in the past ten years anyway.

It's already happened with music (notice all those music shops closing?), movies and games are the next logical leap.

For now, I don't think we're looking at replacement distribution so much as alternative distribution.

For one, typical access bandwidth is growing at a slow pace. It doesn't even appear to be growing faster than game sizes such that it's even catching up. It takes time to download, and it's not going to be universally practical like disks are in the near future.

It would take some kind of technological/infrastructure quantum leap rather than the gradual evolution we have been seeing for the past 20 years.

There's also the issue of initial hardware investment. Imagine having a PS3, having bought 30 games over a few years, and every one of them was stored on your PS3's hard disk. If all the games were half a BD50 in size, that'd be 750GB….that PS3 better have come with a 1TB hard drive and you'd still be looking at which games you'd ditch to make room for new ones. Certainly wouldn't be notebook drives built in anymore - try full size. Add in any other downloaded content… Initial investment is already verging on "too high" for today's consoles and has drastically slowed adoption rates. A $250 HDD built in isn't gonna help things. Now, if it were a matter of a 60 second wait to re-download a game, this wouldn't be much of an issue.

Even most of my coursework for my degree is done over the internet. I don't think it will be long before everything moves over to it.

Rainless is right again, just this week iTunes surpassed the largest brick and mortar seller for music content, Wal-Mart.

I dont know, i don't think bandwidth will increase that much to handle really huge games, some people still live in the boonies, or just have really sucky internet.

And in 10 years from now I still think they will be in this same position.
It will be better but the games will get bigger thus not making much of a difference for the people who arn't in the cities.

FudgeNuggets said:

Rainless is right again, just this week iTunes surpassed the largest brick and mortar seller for music content, Wal-Mart.

Click to expand...

Did you really have massage his ego lol

Where this is really going to help is places that you can't buy games easily. Pretty much everyone in the US can walk outside and be at an electronics retailer in 30 minutes. That is not the case in many places in europe, asia, australia, NZ, etc. I think this is really to help the people who can't easily get to a store, not the United States.

@Bandwidth - I doubt this will be a problem. If you have a moderately good highspeed connection (250KB/sec) you'd be able to download a ~25gig game overnight or while your out in class, or at work etc. Yeah that might be too slow for some people, but in the long run it isn't that bad, and like I said above, people that can't get to a store easily, that's better than having it shipped to you.

Plus if they don't have to use discs / packaging, that will save a little bit of money. If an online game store game could be downloaded for say 45$, as opposed to a 50$ store bought version, I think a lot of people would want to save that extra 5$

I'm one of those people who likes to have the 'hardcopy' and many people are probably the same. Having to re-download everything after my harddrive crashed or something would be a major PITA.

I hope both options are equally viable in the future.

rainless said:

Hell... in about five years time, once internet speeds improve, absolutely everything will be downloaded. That's the direction everything has been moving towards in the past ten years anyway.

It's already happened with music (notice all those music shops closing?), movies and games are the next logical leap.

Click to expand...

I sure hope you're wrong. I personally don't want to witness the death or physical retail. At least gamestop's recent quarterly profits suggest there's a growing demand for new/used phsycial medium.

I know I'll continue to seek shelter at the local gamestop when the wife drags me to the mall.

masakabassist said:

Did you really have massage his ego lol

Click to expand...

If he didnt I was going too, cause I was about to post the same thing

tresmonos said:

I sure hope you're wrong. I personally don't want to witness the death or physical retail. At least gamestop's recent quarterly profits suggest there's a growing demand for new/used phsycial medium.

I know I'll continue to seek shelter at the local gamestop when the wife drags me to the mall.

Click to expand...

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/03/30/

Hahahaha... Gamestop is trying to grab all the money they can before the ship goes down.

And to those who DOUBT that faster internet is coming:

http://www.myfoxlakecharles.com/myf...n=2&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=TSTY&pageId=3.3.1

"The Grid" is reportedly 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection. It will be able to download entire feature films or send huge music files across the world within seconds.

Click to expand...

BELIEVE ME... it'll be here in five years or sooner.

I don't know why people in the gaming world are so quick to ignore history and technological evolution. Why the hell do you think it would just STOP now? I remember back in the Genesis/SNES days they'd said they'd gone as far as technology would allow them with current television technology... but then they came out with the Saturn, N64 and PS1, and then the Xbox, PS2, and gamecube.

I remember when they said they'd gone as far as they could go with bandwith when they hit 14.4k. Then they hit 28.8, 56k, and finally we entered the DSL and Cable eras.

So somehow you think they've finally hit the final wall?

Come now...

Shiggity said:

Where this is really going to help is places that you can't buy games easily. Pretty much everyone in the US can walk outside and be at an electronics retailer in 30 minutes. That is not the case in many places in europe, asia, australia, NZ, etc. I think this is really to help the people who can't easily get to a store, not the United States.

@Bandwidth - I doubt this will be a problem. If you have a moderately good highspeed connection (250KB/sec) you'd be able to download a ~25gig game overnight or while your out in class, or at work etc. Yeah that might be too slow for some people, but in the long run it isn't that bad, and like I said above, people that can't get to a store easily, that's better than having it shipped to you.

Plus if they don't have to use discs / packaging, that will save a little bit of money. If an online game store game could be downloaded for say 45$, as opposed to a 50$ store bought version, I think a lot of people would want to save that extra 5$

I'm one of those people who likes to have the 'hardcopy' and many people are probably the same. Having to re-download everything after my harddrive crashed or something would be a major PITA.

I hope both options are equally viable in the future.

Click to expand...

Only issue with this. At least outside the US it seems more of a pay per month download service so you only get X amount of bandwidth per month to download things. IMO this service would prove useful in the US but only in other instances where people pay for the connection and not bandwidth.

As well at 250KB/sec constant.. it would take 28 hours to download the full 25Gig disk, not to mention what it would take to download a 50Gig game. Mind you then as well the console has to be on full time during this period so it costs a lllllllittle money there as well. Over time if its only a minor price diffference really having the disk for a game that size its more benificial. If its the size of a DVD, well thats another story.

rainless said:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/03/30/

Hahahaha... Gamestop is trying to grab all the money they can before the ship goes down.

And to those who DOUBT that faster internet is coming:

http://www.myfoxlakecharles.com/myf...n=2&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=TSTY&pageId=3.3.1



BELIEVE ME... it'll be here in five years or sooner.

I don't know why people in the gaming world are so quick to ignore history and technological evolution. Why the hell do you think it would just STOP now? I remember back in the Genesis/SNES days they'd said they'd gone as far as technology would allow them with current television technology... but then they came out with the Saturn, N64 and PS1, and then the Xbox, PS2, and gamecube.

I remember when they said they'd gone as far as they could go with bandwith when they hit 14.4k. Then they hit 28.8, 56k, and finally we entered the DSL and Cable eras.

So somehow you think they've finally hit the final wall?

Come now...

Click to expand...

Your dreaming rainless

Just because the technology exists DOES NOT mean it will be rolled out quickly. FIOS has been rolling out for a couple of years now and only major cities and few other areas have it.

And lets NOT forget that every cable company is trying to stop FIOS from coming to their area. Its an uphill battle for Verizon.