Deshara said:
No, sony, YOU don't want digital. Same thing when microsoft says "gamers don't want -thing that gamers really want-"
Haha, no, that's very very wrong. Believe me when I say that Sony would very much have liked to do what Microsoft tried to do if Sony thought it could get away with it. Digital distribution means no manufacturing/packaging/shipping costs for the games and it means that retailers don't get a cut. More for Sony and more for the publisher. No, Sony actually learned some things from their customers and they're quite correct that we still want our disks as long as it takes hours and hours to download the game and as long as the prices remain artificially bloated when in digital stores. This is one of the very few times a "gamers don't want... X" has actually be right. Read the thread and other threads around here, Sony isn't wrong.
That being said, gamers would like it if we had enough storage space to store a ton of 50GB games and if it only took a few minutes or at most a few hours to download.
Microsoft's ideal world, FYI, is one where they house and stream the game to your console. Leaving us without even a digital copy in-house. But that's not them being evil, that's what any of these guys would prefer. Maximum profit and maximum control. It's good business to want it but bad business to make an obvious grab for it against customer's will.
Zachary Amaranth said:
Lightknight said:
M
First off, the default HDDs for both consoles is 500GB. That's all fine and dandy but a game like Uncharted 3 is 40Gbs. That's a current gen game, not next gen. I can easily imagine 100GB games or more with that in mind.
PS4 games are all going to be 50 GBs. The plus side is that you can at least upgrade the HDD. Small favours, I know.
It's a shame we don't have an infrastructure that will work, but hey. Americans don't like to perform services.
I imagine that's 50GB to start with. That'll probably be a thing of the past fairly shortly after this console generation gets up and rolling. But I agree, it is a shame that our infrastructure is so crappy. Even moreso because ISPs have grown stagnant on purpose. Offer as little as possible but charge as much as possible. This is why Google created Google fiber. The primary purpose is to light a fire under the... keasters (sp? I don't think I've ever spelt it) of the ISPs. You see large companies basically able to flip a switch to try and compete with google where it's being offered and it's just more proof that they'd been able to offer this service before.
Carnagath said:
Lightknight said:
Do you believe that had you bought disk versios of XBO games that they somehow wouldn't have fallen into the same category? It has been my experience that if one requires internet connection, both do.
Let me clarify my statement a bit. In the previous state of their DRM policy, indeed, disk or no disk would have probably been irrelevant, due to the 24 hour check-thing, which devs/publishers would have most certainly used as an excuse to make all their games online-only.
Developers would not have been able to use the 24/hour check in to argue that their games require always online play. That'd be silly. What they will argue is that the magic cloud processing is required to render the game properly and so that's what they're STILL going to use to implement always online gaming. You already saw EA try to call that with the SimCity debacle. Imagine a few years down the road when the XBO is trying to compete with the ps4 still but we're beginning to see the estimated 50% more processing power of the ps4. Think about how easy it'll be for the EAs to consider it necessary to port the game.
Now however, since the console will not require an internet connection, a disk-based game will have to either be perfectly playable offline, or at least explicitly state that they require an internet connection (so that you know not to buy them, unless it's actually a mupliplayer-only game). So, indeed, with their new policy, your future access to your games will be safe. In a digital-only console though, you basically have zero guarrantees that Microsoft will not brick everything you own whenever they feel like dropping online support. That's why, in a hypothetical fully-digital console, backwards compatibility will be an absolute must, so you can at least transfer your library between hardware generations.
They will not implement an always online requirement for digital copies but not disk copies. So if your game is cloud process based (I'll call it CPB for this discussion), then it won't matter where you got the game, it'll always be a CPB game. The only hope you'll have is if the next generation after this generation is powerful enough to make up for the difference in processing which isn't entirely unreasonable to expect. But that would require a bit of cloud-side emulation by the console.
I'm sorry, but it just means that your games will start being held hostage to always online gaming if CPB gaming is fully implemented. It does have tangible benefits to the producers and while I do personally have the will power to not purchase most EA games that pull this crap, there will always be titles that are sacred to me that are must-buys regardless.
It should be repeated then, that there's really no difference between digitally distributed and disk distributed games where backwards compatibility is concerned. The only difference may be that the PSN/Live stores know you actually bought the digitally purchased one if that ever helps anyone. If you're talking about them simply maintaining the files you purchased for future downloading, that shouldn't be a problem but I think that's a concern anyways. I mean, what happens if Steam ever goes under?
