Well continuing the, uh original conversation. I dont think Physical Media will ever die. It will always be cheeper to store data in physical form, rather then digitaly. Wether it will be worth the space is another question.
My guess is physical media for video games will be dead sometime around 2020-25. By "dead" I mean in a state where music CDs are at now and where Movie/TV show DVDs/Blu-Rays are heading for too. In other words, sure, some small amount of people still purchase music CDs, but by and large the audio CD market is moribund.
Until hard drives for the gaming platform of choice become outrageously large, physical copies will remain. No one wants to delete games to make room for things and if companies want to go digital, they need to make sure we don't have to constantly fight for space with other games.
I don't see it going away any time soon, maybe in 5+ years, but for now they will stay.
I think we've still got a solid 10-20 years of movies and video games being released on physical media, but personally, I'm ready and willing to embrace an all digital future. It's extremely convenient, and I really don't need more crates filled with games to move around every few years when I move into a new place.
Well continuing the, uh original conversation. I dont think Physical Media will ever die. It will always be cheeper to store data in physical form, rather then digitaly. Wether it will be worth the space is another question.
Er, what? N64 cartridges, which held 64MB of data, were notoriously expensive to manufacture. It is far, far, far cheaper (per GB) to buy a hard drive and have content delivered digitally than to copy it to physical media and deliver it physically. You might be right when you say it's cheaper to store data in physical form, in a convoluted sense of the word 'right', because data isn't stored exclusively digitally. Everything is stored physically somewhere, be it on a hard drive or server or CD.
A better question would be if physical distribution will ever die. I certainly hope so, but we need better infrastructure first. There are still plenty of places in North America that don't have access to highspeed internet, which is a necessity for those useless plastic discs to become absolutely worthless.
I recently threw away a bunch of brand new things, including games, because I just don't care about owning physical media any more. I play/watch things once and I'm done. Absolutely zero need to keep things.
It isn't so much that disks are good or bad but the supply chain is kind of terrible compared to some technology we have now. In the best of all worlds, if you wanted the CoD Black Ops 15 then you would buy it from whoever is created it and they'd deliver the disk to you next day. Gamestop and Best Buy and Wal-mart serve no purpose beyond being the middle man and in the case of Gamestop a very annoying middle man.
I don't mind seeing physical media die, as whatever advantage they once had is eroding away anyway. My copy of Bioshock for example stopped being installable as the auto-patch server was(is?) down. All those games requiring GFWL will run into problem as well once the servers they want to contact go away. I also had two cases of games lately that had game breaking bugs on the disc, so I had to get a patch if I wanted to finish them. On consoles it's not quite that big a problem, as there is more quality control and online activation is extremely rare, but all those preorder/bonus/whatever DLC ensures that your physical copy is not actually the whole game. On top of all of this there is also of course multiplayer which is a big part of many games these days and that will stop functioning no matter how well preserved you DVD or Bluray might be.
So yeah, physical games used to be nice, but even physical copies start to need online these days, so why bother with the physical when I have to be online anyway.
The only thing that might save physical media for a while are slow networks, modern games can get huge and they will get even bigger in the next generation. A 50GB download is simply to much for most peoples network connection these days, as that would take longer then getting the stuff shipped on disc. So while I expect PS4 and Xbox720 to still contain drives, after that all bets are of. I'd be surprised if PS6 still had physical media.
@Dagbiker: Eventually physical stuff will mostly die out. Nothing is absolute, but I'm sure in a few generations, it'll go all digital. And as time goes on, discs will disappear and the physical media will be something else entirely. USB sticks with much faster access times, and larger capacities, hefty SD cards, stuff like that.
Well continuing the, uh original conversation. I dont think Physical Media will ever die. It will always be cheeper to store data in physical form, rather then digitaly. Wether it will be worth the space is another question.
Er, what? N64 cartridges, which held 64MB of data, were notoriously expensive to manufacture. It is far, far, far cheaper (per GB) to buy a hard drive and have content delivered digitally than to copy it to physical media and deliver it physically. You might be right when you say it's cheaper to store data in physical form, in a convoluted sense of the word 'right', because data isn't stored exclusively digitally. Everything is stored physically somewhere, be it on a hard drive or server or CD.
A better question would be if physical distribution will ever die. I certainly hope so, but we need better infrastructure first. There are still plenty of places in North America that don't have access to highspeed internet, which is a necessity for those useless plastic discs to become absolutely worthless.
I was speaking of cartridges when I was speaking about digital media. A hunk of plastic will always be cheaper then a microchip.
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