Rainless, I told you so... buh-bye physical media

[Mr.Guvernment]

Sure they COULD do it but there'd be no profit in that. You want more speed than DSL or Cable can provide. Get a dedicated T3, that's THEIR solution.

problem is alot of people cant even get DSL or cable due to location.

 

[nightelph]

And I still say it won't happen as soon as they want it to.

Nevermind the amount of idiots out there who still don't even know what the internet IS... you still have to factor in the idea that America still has, quite possibly, the slowest internet in the entire world... then you have to factor in the amount of people in the states who are still technology illiterate. THEN of course you have to remember that... for all those people who are signed up to PSN and Xbox Live there are just as many people who have these systems but don't have them connected online. (Do a search for total list of Xbox 360s sold vs total Xbox Live! clients to confirm.)

It would happen in Europe or Asia loooooong before it happened here. And I'm not talking months either... I'm talking YEARS from now.

Until there is a genuine infrastructure in this country to support all that traffic then, whether the OPTION exists or not... downloadable sales will NOT beat out physical media.

I'm thinking there's another ten years before that changes. (Depending on legislation and presidents of course...)

late to the thread, cut I gotta side with Rainless on this one. People still like to have media in their hands.

 

[Mortis03]

late to the thread, cut I gotta side with Rainless on this one. People still like to have media in their hands.

Exactly... A couple of years back, I borrowed a CD from a buddy and accidently broke it. I picked up a used CD from the local music store and kept the box and gave him the CD out of it. He was pretty mad that I did that and I ended up giving him the box. His reasoning was that he likes to keep the cd with the book and box and all that stuff. This guy can get a little ocd about things like that, but the point is that some ppl like to have things in hand. I guess it could be similar to collecting baseball cards or something of the like.

I used to buy DVDs a lot of movies I really like. Half of them I never even opened, I just like having them.

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

All I can say is that it took me days to download my Steam collection when I built my new rig - not because I have slow internet but because I have so many of them and I could only download in short bursts before I'd want to play a game online without having my ping butchered by me dling at 350kb/s. I can say that, whenever I can, I will buy physical media purely because the idea of reinstalling and re-downloading all these games from steam hurts. Especially games like Crysis [Warhead] the too of them combined is 15gb. Hell no will I download that, that's a galactic waste of time.

Um, yo do know you could just burn your steamfolder to disks?
You can backup games, as a whole, or individually as well from within steam and break it up into what size you want to burn too.

 

[jaredavidporter]

Um, yo do know you could just burn your steamfolder to disks?
You can backup games, as a whole, or individually as well from within steam and break it up into what size you want to burn too.

But not many of us know how to do that

 

[rainless]

Um, yo do know you could just burn your steamfolder to disks?
You can backup games, as a whole, or individually as well from within steam and break it up into what size you want to burn too.

He could also buy the games from a store!

Then he wouldn't have to do any burning at all... Or any downloading. (Unless he bought Empire: Total War.)

His game would be RIGHT THERE in the open.

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

right there to open, and then download any updates, if you take right from steam it likely already has all the most recent updates in it

TF2 for example has over a 1g of updates to download.

 

[Ahgemon]

not possible yet

interesting read, microsoft is starting to make the games available online, and a few to start with.

I agree with alot of you, the US market does not have the bandwidth for total online media traffic. we can do it up to a point right now and we are, but 100%, it will be years if ever.

first off console hard drives need to be much bigger than they are today. you could do a few games, but hundreds and hundreds of games? no-way. Games are getting to be 10Gigabytes, average console hdd, 60 to 120 Gigabytes.

so the hardware has quite a long time to catch up to the demand for such a huge shift in media entertainment and new standards.

I almost think microsoft would just have users login on xbox live, and have theyre online media stored at microsofts own online servers. Again huge boost in bandwidth needed and alot of home console gammers do not have internet or do but not using xbox live.

which leads me to peoples preference, a friend of mine, who likes to game on the consoles told me he had no interest in playing world of warcraft.

why? because he wants to physically own his games, have a copy of the game, play single player, save his game data on his local machine and not over the internet on a server.

A majority of the gamming community will always be like that folks, and willing to go out and buy a copy of a game and add it to theyre libraries of video games.

Pride in ownership, I totally understand this, I am one for instance. Got a cool collection of console and pc games in my library and I could really care less for this "total online access standard" which could be possible in the years ahead.

People shifted from tapes and cd's to mp3's ....mostly. but even now you can still get a cd if you want.

So who knows, at this point its safe to say it could go either way, and absolutley needs alot of work ahead for this standard to take hold.

I just feel physical media is here to stay as long as gamers are willing to pony up the cash for a copy. just my thoughts on it.

 

[Niku-Sama]

is the horse dead yet?

 

[sandyduff]

It's infrastructure. The United States and Canada are such large countries and people are so spread out that it's a lot harder to upgrade, run new wiring etc..etc...etc... than it is in a smaller country like England or France. I mean, England is smaller than Colorado.

Small countries suffer from the same thing... whats their excuse? Some folk in the UK dont have access to broadband at all.... never mind fast broadband....

 

[rainless]

Small countries suffer from the same thing... whats their excuse? Some folk in the UK dont have access to broadband at all.... never mind fast broadband....

Some people in Zimbabwe don't have access to clean drinking water. What's your point?

 

[I.M.O.G.]

His point is obvious - size alone isn't a valid explanation for the state of Highspeed internet in the US.

Large infrastructure upgrades like this are hugely impacted by funding. The united states telecoms got the Telecom Act of 1996 which allowed them to charge fees to help fund infrastructure upgrades, which they promptly used to roll up fatties, drink dom perignon, and generally do anything other than put that money towards meaningful modernization of infrastructure. The act also hasn't fostered the competition necessary to motivate widespread improvements.

 

[sandyduff]

His point is obvious - size alone isn't a valid explanation for the state of Highspeed internet in the US.

Large infrastructure upgrades like this are hugely impacted by funding. The united states telecoms got the Telecom Act of 1996 which allowed them to charge fees to help fund infrastructure upgrades, which they promptly used to roll up fatties, drink dom perignon, and generally do anything other than put that money towards meaningful modernization of infrastructure. The act also hasn't fostered the competition necessary to motivate widespread improvements.

Thanks I.M.O.G, that is exactly my point... only the big cities get the super fast broadband... i live less than 10 miles away from Edinburgh, and im getting a 1/3 of the broadband speed that they are getting....