Electronic Arts Exec Says Boxed Games Are Here To Stay

[Tuesday Night Fever]

This news doesn't matter at all for regular edition copies, since everything is still going to require Origin to run anyway. Kinda defeats one of the primary reasons for buying physical copies.

Same goes for games that require Steam, or uPlay, or whatever.

It allows people not to have to download 50 gigabytes of a game and someone like me who has been screwed over by their government to allow for ridiculously low bandwidth caps for many years it won't mean they have to sacrifice paying more money for extra bandwidth or changing their internet usage for a month.

Except even that's a moot point when many of these AAA games already have huge multi-gigabyte patches that need to be downloaded immediately upon installation anyway. Given that games are getting larger and the storage capacity of a DVD isn't, this might actually get worse over time.

EDIT:

Make no mistake, I'm very much pro-physical copy. The overwhelming majority of media I buy is physical. It just kinda grinds my gears that even the physical copies still require the owner to have a half dozen digital stores installed on their computers before they can play.

No other form of media treats its consumers with as much disrespect, and we constantly let these guys get away with it. Hell, we usually praise them for treating us like crap.

 

[Strazdas]

of course all digital is not possible. its going to conitinue not being possible as long as internet is allwed to be controlled by greed from ISPs. they have the infrastructure, they just dont want to let you use it.

Right now, Google is the only ISP looking to the future.

you mean google is the only ISP that is looking at last decade while still charging more than i paid for same service 5 years ago? I mean its good they are taking the steps and all but lets not act like they are spearheading anything.

It allows people not to have to download 50 gigabytes of a game and someone like me who has been screwed over by their government to allow for ridiculously low bandwidth caps for many years it won't mean they have to sacrifice paying more money for extra bandwidth or changing their internet usage for a month.

you dont ever need to download 50 GBs of game though. even the Titanfall download actually was around 20 GB when compressed and it would uncompress it locally, just like every download service does nowadays. Titanfall was a fluke anyway, why would you need uncompressed audio nowadays is beyond me, unless you are using a 10 year old technology, cough, old consoles, cough.

 

[MrBaskerville]

Once both consoles take the leap and go full digital only, then EA will follow. Only problem with digitally downloading games on consoles that it costs the same or more than buying disc.

That, and it takes forever to download stuff. I can manage to download some demoes, but when i downloaded Remember Me it took around 8 hours and that wasn't much more than 5GB. Maybe i don't have the best internet, but it's not THAT bad, i'd say it's just about average for what most people in Denmark got. So i'm guessing it would take around 3-4 days to download one single game on the new consoles.

 

[blackrave]

I think this fits perfectly with this opinion


Sure, boxed games will be around, just as vinyl records are still around

 

[Kahani]

digital will dominate

To be fair, analogue computers have never really been as popular for gaming.