Ooooookay, it's REALLY time for PC games to go Blu Ray now....

AceGoober said:
I, as a PC Gamer, am not ditching my optical drive for any reason as I have a very large collection of games on CD / DVD which are not present on Steam or any other online service.

It would be very cool if games were on flash drives. Installing from optical discs is a relatively slow and time consuming process especially if the game is a multi-disk set. Flash drives would eliminate the need to continually swap out discs and are relatively cheap to boot.
Click to expand...

I have very few games left that are physical and the ones I do I just keep an .iso of it and a no cd crack if required on my back up server. I've got a busted optical drive in my PC, hasn't worked in 4 years and I have no reason to repair it.

As to the OP I don't see this happening, I'm willing to bet most computers don't have and will never have blu-ray drives. Its skipping from cd to digital. They still need cd for those with poor internet (low caps and such) but those that don't almost every game you buy physically can still be linked online and downloaded from a service anyways.
 
I've let myself use Steam more and more over the past year than I ever had before. I wasnt always happy about it though.

My fear is still that some day internet service will be billed like most cell phones.... with a small cap and high overage fees. That right there could push people right back to physical media.

I just dont see flat rate internet being the norm going forward when there's just too much money to be made with low caps and overages charged by the byte.

Time will tell I guess.
 
I definitely lol'd at the time estimate on that screenshot. And yes, blu-ray burner drives have come down considerably in price, and I have one, so I wouldn't be against a switch to blu-ray. Though I suspect the average consumer majority is too lazy, cheap, or unwilling to upgrade their drives to blu-ray themselves. So there's that to deal with.
 
Viper87227 said:
That makes no sense from a cost standpoint. 32GB flash drive ~$10-$15. 4x DVD-R DL ~$2.50. That's going based off retail prices. Obviously anyone bulk manufacturing is going to get a much better price, but no matter what disks are always going to be a fraction of the cost.

Consoles are going to remain disk based no matter what, and with PC gaming, DD rules the roost. I'm sure a very small percentage of people still buy disk based PC games. What would the point be of developing a new, most expensive method of distributing games for an extremely small percentage of their total buyers?
Click to expand...
You need 4 DL DVDs to store 32GB of data, so $2.50 * 4 = $10.00 and you're at the low end of your flash drive estimate. It would literally cost the same either way going by those numbers.
John721 said:
I definitely lol'd at the time estimate on that screenshot. And yes, blu-ray burner drives have come down considerably in price, and I have one, so I wouldn't be against a switch to blu-ray. Though I suspect the average consumer majority is too lazy, cheap, or unwilling to upgrade their drives to blu-ray themselves. So there's that to deal with.
Click to expand...
Indeed. If all you need is a read drive you can pick one up for $20. Although that is still literally twice the price of a DVD drive! The Blu-ray/HD-DVD RW combo drive I have was only $50 when I bought it 5 years ago.
 
Ya, the solution is not to buy discs anymore just buy a key / on steam / origin and install. If you are the rare person who doesn't have internet or something then just use a portable hard drive.

Blu rays are a joke, SONY has screwed them over and made it so they suck on computers, the end result is hardly anyone is putting them on computers. No BR on any apple computers, no BR on most ultra books, and BR players still this many years after release cost a lot more than DVD players for home built etc..... Give up no company is going to put shit on BR when most computers don't have BR players. This is just one more reason PC gamers gave up on optical formats years ago.
 
I've used the BR burner in my PC a lot. Both to archive some stuff off and to back up other things and rip discs to my NAS.

I guess a lot of it depends on what generation you grew up in. For me, buying a physical copy of a game/cd was the norm, and still is for the most part. I like having something tangible in my hands, and dont trust digital only content that much still.

While it may not happen often, just knowing that Steam or Amazon could remove something from my account due to some fubar licensing issue bothers me. I prefer having more control over my media.

Even my music is still bought on CD's, and with Amazon AutoRIP I get digital copies to use as well without even having to rip it. Best of both worlds to me.
 
Armenius said:
You need 4 DL DVDs to store 32GB of data, so $2.50 * 4 = $10.00 and you're at the low end of your flash drive estimate. It would literally cost the same either way going by those numbers.
Click to expand...

You misread my numbers. Four disks is roughly $2.50, not one disk. There is no way flash memory could be as cheap as discs.
 
I have a huge collection of classic games and their game boxes on a couple bookshelves in my computer room. Honestly, it looks cool and adds some ambiance. It's about 20 years worth of games. I only buy a few games a year and I don't keep the boxes for games that sucked or were MMOs that I don't play anymore so it's manageable. Plus most of the new stuff I buy is on Steam (whether I want to or not) so it hasn't grown much the past few years.
 
I ended up creating ISO's for most of my old games and backing them up on a 2TB hard drive. I still have the disks in a drawer but it makes everything a hell of a lot easier and quicker for any games I actually go back to.
Beyond the inconvenience factor - optical disks are slow. In some instances (like Gears of War) it's borderline faster to download the game from Steam than to install the damn thing from a disk.
 
Astral Abyss said:
I have a huge collection of classic games and their game boxes on a couple bookshelves in my computer room. Honestly, it looks cool and adds some ambiance. It's about 20 years worth of games. I only buy a few games a year and I don't keep the boxes for games that sucked or were MMOs that I don't play anymore so it's manageable. Plus most of the new stuff I buy is on Steam (whether I want to or not) so it hasn't grown much the past few years.
Click to expand...

I like being able to physically look at something, pick it up, look at the cool box art, smile and remember all the fond gaming memories I had playing it.
 
I wouldn't even mind the slight cost increase for flash drives, I'm already dishing $40.00 for games lol.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top