Somonah said:
People still buy PC games from stores?
EDIT- i bet the people who buy PC games from RL shops also have VHS players, a CRT monitor and music on cassettes.
I have all of the above, what's your point?
Though most of those are because it's stuff that's hanging around I'm too poor to replace (e.g. the 14" CRT TV + VCR in the kitchen, currently no good for anything but old movies until I can find what cupboard my spare digital receiver got buried in; the tape player is built into my car dashboard and would cost more to replace than the vehicle is worth, so I may as well keep playing the mixtapes that took so many of my youthful hours to create), there's still a good argument to be made for having physical copies of games available. It's a lot quicker and more robust to install for a start: even the slowest, most ultramobile contemporary DVD drive won't take more than 30 minutes to read that data... my own somewhat chunkier drive would probably do it in less than a quarter hour. That's equivalent to a 22 ~ 50 Mbit internet link. The fastest I can ever get to my home is 13Mbit, and you can bet that it won't even be 1/10th that speed when the servers are being hammered on release day.
My somewhat cheap internet also comes with a 10 Gbyte "daytime" (08:00 to 23:59) monthly cap, which this would eat 60% of if I put the disc in to install it without realising that it was all going to come off the net... if I was already sailing close to that limit and otherwise rationing myself, it could potentially cost me an extra £10 (on top of the purchase price, and a £12.99 phone/net tariff) because it would bust thru the bandwidth cap, and then through the extra 5Gb-for-£5 limit which would have been automatically added. I could try downloading it overnight, but getting it within the "free" window cap would need at least a continuous 1.8Mbit transfer rate across myself, my ISP, the backbone, and the Steam servers, which I bet will be hard to come by for the next couple weeks. *Portal* took goddamn long enough to copy when I grabbed it on their free offer...
Plus this also makes it difficult if not impossible to archive a working copy of the game for future review or replay when the download servers for it are inevitably shut down in a few years' time. As someone who is currently in the middle of experiencing a lot of near-10-year-old classics for the first time, having had to give regular gaming an extended hiatus because of life-chaos reasons, I wouldn't appreciate being forced to miss it entirely. It'd be like going back to a time before VCRs and DVDs, in TV terms. (Which is also why I don't fancy the idea of physical CDs and DVDs disappearing from the market)
And of course, if your internet is patchy in any case, you're going to have extra difficulty even getting hold of the game, on top of issues with playing it cooperatively. And you can use the disc to install even if the Steam server is temporarily broken, and get playing straight away when service is restored.
Plus, they already went to the effort of writing the code and pressing up all those discs - when they could have just given you a scrap of paper with a URL and password printed on it. This seems massively counterproductive. Hopefully they'll offer to replace these "dummy" discs with real ones once the mass market release day has passed? We can't even make the argument that this is a penny-pinching money saving manoeuvre (what, 50p per copy maybe?) because it takes just as much time and money to press an almost-blank disc as a chock-full one. And the pirates will probably find a way to snag the download copy and hack it to work anyway. Mad.
Oh, and my other CRT monitor is still in occasional use because I have some classic consoles that DON'T WORK WITH LCD TVS because they use weird scanline modes that CRTs understand just fine, but LCDs go crazy with. Or they output RGB down a scart lead but not the "I am using RGB" signal that the monitor has a manual switch for.
tl;dr NOT EVERY OLD THING OR IDEA IS AUTOMATICALLY BAD, just as not every new idea or thing is automatically good. Jeez.
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