Return of physical copies and blu-ray requirement?

K

King Icewind

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jan 17, 2008
Messages
5,442
With the upcoming new consoles requiring 50GB or so installs do you think we might see a lot more people going back to buying physical copies of games rather than downloading? This would require a lot of us to upgrade to a blu-ray drive from DVD. I know some people don't even put drives in their computer too.

I download pretty much all my games now, but 50GB is a lot especially if you uninstall it and want to play it again at a later time. I'm sure our ISPs won't like it much either. It would be faster for me to get the physical drive and install it. I only have a 30/5 connection: that's 3.75 hours on a good day downloading a 50GB game. For some with it won't matter but for many I think it will.

So, yep.
 
Last edited:
Doesn't everyone buy physical when it's an option? Relying on a digital distribution platform to remain viable for years to come doesn't seem like the long play.
 
rsbennett00 said:
I realize it's dying but it's not dead.

I fear for the future when steam/origin/uplay go out of business.
Click to expand...

Use services like GOG where you download the game in its entirety. Digital distribution doesn't have to be DRM. Steam isn't likely to go anywhere, but it's still a bit of a gamble. The other client based services should probably be avoided at all costs
 
LeninGHOLA said:
Use services like GOG where you download the game in its entirety. Digital distribution doesn't have to be DRM. Steam isn't likely to go anywhere, but it's still a bit of a gamble. The other client based services should probably be avoided at all costs
Click to expand...

I think GOG is just old games? They used to pack in bloatware, are they still doing that?
 
rsbennett00 said:
Doesn't everyone buy physical when it's an option? Relying on a digital distribution platform to remain viable for years to come doesn't seem like the long play.
Click to expand...

The probability of my house burning down and losing all my physical games is higher than the probability of Steam going under.
 
LeninGHOLA said:
No. Retail for games is a dying industry.
Click to expand...

I'd still rather have a physical copy, especially for Blu-Ray/DVD and Console games. It'll die when it dies, but for now, I hope it's still around for a while.

For PC, I don't mind downloading. It's about 80/20 for downloading vs. buying physical copies with PC games with me.
 
BiH115 said:
I'd still rather have a physical copy, especially for Blu-Ray/DVD and Console games. It'll die when it dies, but for now, I hope it's still around for a while.

For PC, I don't mind downloading. It's about 80/20 for downloading vs. buying physical copies with PC games with me.
Click to expand...

For a young guy, you sure hold onto old traditions. Do you have a VCR, too? :p
 
rsbennett00 said:
Don't you have insurance?

And someone want to move this into PC gaming since it's not about consoles?
Click to expand...

Yeah, I have insurance, but it's not like I have some comprehensive list of my physical game media, and even then I'd still have to go out and rebuy them from a million different people since they'll no longer be in stores. If Steam ever goes under, it's a certainty we'll have some kind of advance warning, and they'll probably provide an exit strategy.

It's not as if there is some meaningful risk of me waking up tomorrow to find Steam gone.
 
I buy retail games so I can trade them in.

Last game I bought was PS3 Diablo 3 for $50. Play the heck out of it, then traded it in to Amazon for $33 credit + $30 bonus credit to apply towards a Dualshock 4. Net out of pocket cost for over 100 hours of Diablo 3 and a Dualshock 4 was $50.

Good friend of mine bought the digital download version of D3 for $60, is now done with it, and cannot get anything for the game.
 
King Icewind said:
With the upcoming new consoles requiring 50GB or so installs do you think we might see a lot more people going back to buying physical copies of games rather than downloading? This would require a lot of us to upgrade to a blu-ray drive from DVD. I know some people don't even put drives in their computer too.

I download pretty much all my games now, but 50GB is a lot especially if you uninstall it and want to play it again at a later time. I'm sure our ISPs won't like it much either. It would be faster for me to get the physical drive and install it. I only have a 30/5 connection: that's 3.75 hours on a good day downloading a 50GB game. For some with it won't matter but for many I think it will.

So, yep.
Click to expand...

You are in the US, right?

The thing with low bandwidth at high cost is purely a US phenomenon at this time, and it is artificial from lack of effective competition. The Europeans got that sorted out a lot better, and it's just politics holding us back.

The solution for your problem is 128M-1G connections, not USPS.
 
NKDietrich said:
Yeah, I have insurance, but it's not like I have some comprehensive list of my physical game media, and even then I'd still have to go out and rebuy them from a million different people since they'll no longer be in stores. If Steam ever goes under, it's a certainty we'll have some kind of advance warning, and they'll probably provide an exit strategy.

It's not as if there is some meaningful risk of me waking up tomorrow to find Steam gone.
Click to expand...

True, gfwl gave us warning.

I'm probably weird that I do keep a list of all my games and it would indeed by annoying to go find them all again but I'd just take the replacement value payout and replace them as I wanted.
 
Well with Comcast announcing expanding its "experimental" program for charging overages on its soon to be reinforced download cap (300 GB per month again with $10 dollars more per 50GB being charged or possibly less GB's) and then other ISP's likely following suit I say Blu Ray has a nice long life ahead of it with dumb shit like that still being kicked around.

With games hitting 45GB's during launch for both systems I think it'll be interesting to see complaints from users who get nasty notices from their ISP's about their "excessive" usage because they downloaded over the cap for the month.

DSL users are totally fucked because almost every DSL user has a pretty abysmal cap to deal with.

I think until ISP's realize they simply can't reasonably charge us for the ever increasing data requirements of being connected to the internet that physical media still will have a nice long life left.
 
I think towards the end of the cycle more games will distributed digitally. For consoles I still primarily get the discs because of used games.

For PC I pretty much get all my games digitally now. The last game I got a physical copy was Cataclysm back 2010.

The only way I'm going to start getting them digitally is once they start making them cheaper. They start doing steam like sales on consoles, and I'll be all over it.

Bandwidth will be an issue, but mainly because ISPs want to be able to monetize on the usage. When dial-up came out the phone companies had no way making money on the extra usage. So they're gonna try squeeze whatever then can out of everyone.
 
Last edited:
I prefer physical copies, but I'm not against digital only. It mostly just comes down to drive space, so for consoles, it's preferred to have the disc when I can.
 
LeninGHOLA said:
For a young guy, you sure hold onto old traditions. Do you have a VCR, too? :p
Click to expand...

I'm just not a fan of downloading shit on my consoles, it always ends up taking forever, regardless of how fast my connection is.

It's much easier to go into GameStop literally 200 paces down the road, pick the game up, and be playing within 10 minutes. It's just simpler.

I don't like to wait, ever. For anything. Time is valuable to me.
 
I would be screwed if I couldn't get the games on physical media. My internet is so slow that I'd wait a week or more to get something that large.
 
BiH115 said:
I'm just not a fan of downloading shit on my consoles, it always ends up taking forever, regardless of how fast my connection is.

It's much easier to go into GameStop literally 200 paces down the road, pick the game up, and be playing within 10 minutes. It's just simpler.

I don't like to wait, ever. For anything. Time is valuable to me.
Click to expand...

I never understood why the 360 and ps3 are so shitty when it comes to digital distribution. Even small XBLA games take forever. I hope the next gen consoles fix this, as their limitations just put another nail in the coffin.
 
LeninGHOLA said:
I never understood why the 360 and ps3 are so shitty when it comes to digital distribution. Even small XBLA games take forever. I hope the next gen consoles fix this, as their limitations just put another nail in the coffin.
Click to expand...

Yep, one of the main reasons really.
 
I see this got moved to Consoles. I actually wanted it in the PC Gaming area. It was meant to be about having to get a blu-ray player/big downloading for our PCs.
 
uOpt said:
The thing with low bandwidth at high cost is purely a US phenomenon at this time, and it is artificial from lack of effective competition. The Europeans got that sorted out a lot better, and it's just politics holding us back.
Click to expand...
Things are a bit better over here in the UK but not all that much. The big ISPs tend not to have caps but they DO have congestion issues. Small boutique ISPs are more careful to avoid congestion issues but often have horribly low caps. Pick your poison.

There are still many parts of the UK where ADSL is still the only broadband option available**. Virgin media's predessors* cabled up about half of UK properties and then stopped and while BT openreach are now rolling out a new FTTC service there are lots of places that currently can't get it even in urban areas. As we all know ADSL speeds vary with distance form the exchange, so some will get over 20 megabits per second while others will get less than 1 megabit per second on the same service. Even in places that can get FTTC there is a fairly steep step up in price so only regular heavy users are likely to get it.

* Virgin media is basically an amalgamation of pretty much all the cable TV companies in the UK.
** And indeed there are some properties that can only get dialup.
 
rsbennett00 said:
Doesn't everyone buy physical when it's an option? Relying on a digital distribution platform to remain viable for years to come doesn't seem like the long play.
Click to expand...

Not me. I'd rather be able to have all my games immediately accessible without having to swap discs. Also, I don't have to worry about games getting damaged, lost, borrowed and not returned, etc. It's mine and it's mine forever.

As for the argument of download size and time, I'm hoping the play while you download function works as well as they want us to believe. But even if it didn't, and I still had to download 50GB before I could play, I would.

Next round of consoles will be all digital for me. I'm looking forward to it.
 
uOpt said:
The thing with low bandwidth at high cost is purely a US phenomenon at this time, and it is artificial from lack of effective competition. The Europeans got that sorted out a lot better, and it's just politics holding us back.
Click to expand...

The US is actually better than most other countries, but I agree our prices could be lower if competition weren't artificially limited.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2013/03/12/broadband-prices/
 
I'm answering this from a PC perspective since it makes more sense in that context and that was the OPs original intention.

I'll stay digital due to cost reasons, part if due to being market related (digital prices) and the other being location related (taxes/shipping). I don't have a disc drive on my main computer (not even DVD) and I have a relatively slow connection as well (6mb down).

Also for the PC the actual physical copy nowadays mostly doesn't matter since the game license will be tied into some sort of online service or activation anyways, the only thing that you are really buying is the usage license. You can backup the digital version data onto physical storage the same as it would be if you bought it on disc and in both cases that data will not be technically usable by itself. As such I don't understand the reasoning for buying physical due to the physical backup.
 
Well I have seen several physical media that are just a waste of a disk.
you put it in and it says installing and goes and dl everything. So the only thing on the disk is a script to dl the game weeeeeeee
 
uOpt said:
The solution for your problem is 128M-1G connections, not USPS.
Click to expand...

Your "solution" does not exist outside of a very select few neighborhoods in the USA. Furtherit isn't like ANY game server will provide you 128M-1G for downloading IRL. Even torrents will be pressed to take advantage of more than 50megabit down.

sparks said:
The US is actually better than most other countries, but I agree our prices could be lower if competition weren't artificially limited.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2013/03/12/broadband-prices/
Click to expand...

Yea. What counts as "broadband"?

In the USA anything above 3megabit-down/768kilobit-up is "broadband", legally speaking. Which frankly, even my parents don't have broadband as their upload connection is 0.5 megabit AND they're billed $50/month for 6-megabit down (which IRL due to Windstream overselling bandwidth, in practice at all hours of the day is no faster than 3megabit down.)

And here's what the FCC says about "broadband availability": http://www.fcc.gov/maps/broadband-availability

Even given the FCC's hilariously underachieving definition of what constitutes "broadband"....Note all the red areas where it is unavailable. Your link is laughable.
 
Skripka said:
Your link is laughable.
Click to expand...

What topic are you trying to discuss? The average price, the average available speed, the average price per/mbps? We all know that the US doesn't have a uniform population distribution, so an availability map isn't useful for any of those discussions unless you can match it up with a population map.

There are going to be people in every country that pay more than average or get worse service than average. I don't think anybody would dispute that.
 
Mozex said:
What topic are you trying to discuss? The average price, the average available speed, the average price per/mbps? We all know that the US doesn't have a uniform population distribution, so an availability map isn't useful for any of those discussions unless you can match it up with a population map.

There are going to be people in every country that pay more than average or get worse service than average. I don't think anybody would dispute that.
Click to expand...

What I dispute is that you can get ANY ISP service ANYWHERE in the USA that counts as "broadband" in the USA for $20USD/month. I'm of the opinion they pulled that number straight out of their ass. Which is why that link is laughable, as I said.

You can't get an ISP service of any service tier for $20/month that isn't 56K dialup in the USA. No matter where you are. Unless you're going to count dialup as "broadband".
 
Even if you buy the game they have mandatory installs for PS4 and X1. Personally I never buy digital since I like being able to sell or trade the game when I don't want it any more.
 
sparks said:
Well I have seen several physical media that are just a waste of a disk.
you put it in and it says installing and goes and dl everything. So the only thing on the disk is a script to dl the game weeeeeeee
Click to expand...

that sounds like it d/l a patch. It should install core game files (music, graphics, map design/items/locations) off the disk then d/l a patch that up dates gameplay type stuff. Which map items/locations is part of..
 
Skripka said:
Your "solution" does not exist outside of a very select few neighborhoods in the USA. Furtherit isn't like ANY game server will provide you 128M-1G for downloading IRL. Even torrents will be pressed to take advantage of more than 50megabit down.
Click to expand...

Yes, but it is an artificial problem. The US would be leading in broadband performance/price if it wasn't for lack of competition caused by... insert politics here.

p2p as a speedup for downloading games is already practiced, e.g. Turbine game even force it. Right now it is not good because it is forced upon users with intransparent software that is also hard to control and does random shit, including not making clean when it's active and when it is not.

But since the game distribution files are freely distributable nothing would keep users from setting up fast p2p networks for them on their own, with protocols and software of their choosing.
 
ocellaris said:
Good friend of mine bought the digital download version of D3 for $60, is now done with it, and cannot get anything for the game.
Click to expand...

Paying 60 bucks for a game you can't ever re-sell to me is absolutely ludicrous.

Now 15 or under? Sometimes 20? I'm ok with DD for that.
 
pigwalk said:
Paying 60 bucks for a game you can't ever re-sell to me is absolutely ludicrous.

Now 15 or under? Sometimes 20? I'm ok with DD for that.
Click to expand...

heheh... a fool and his money will depart.... I kid i kid... thats a reason why a growing trend is to wait on buying games or getting them on sale.
 
Skripka said:
What I dispute is that you can get ANY ISP service ANYWHERE in the USA that counts as "broadband" in the USA for $20USD/month. I'm of the opinion they pulled that number straight out of their ass. Which is why that link is laughable, as I said.

You can't get an ISP service of any service tier for $20/month that isn't 56K dialup in the USA. No matter where you are. Unless you're going to count dialup as "broadband".
Click to expand...

If you read the text of the article they do explain what they consider 'broadband', and yes it is a rather low standard.

I can get 6.0 mbps DSL from AT&T in San Diego for $19.95 / month.
 
Mozex said:
If you read the text of the article they do explain what they consider 'broadband', and yes it is a rather low standard.

I can get 6.0 mbps DSL from AT&T in San Diego for $19.95 / month.
Click to expand...

they charge 34.95 for that here.. Considering SC is one of the most corrupt, thats what we get for letting corps buy our politicians.
 
Godmachine said:
Well with Comcast announcing expanding its "experimental" program for charging overages on its soon to be reinforced download cap (300 GB per month again with $10 dollars more per 50GB being charged or possibly less GB's) and then other ISP's likely following suit I say Blu Ray has a nice long life ahead of it with dumb shit like that still being kicked around.

With games hitting 45GB's during launch for both systems I think it'll be interesting to see complaints from users who get nasty notices from their ISP's about their "excessive" usage because they downloaded over the cap for the month.

DSL users are totally fucked because almost every DSL user has a pretty abysmal cap to deal with.

I think until ISP's realize they simply can't reasonably charge us for the ever increasing data requirements of being connected to the internet that physical media still will have a nice long life left.
Click to expand...


i agree here. Also if you were to take the game over to a friends house, probably quicker installing from disc then internet. I know going over to friends is dying trend but it still does happen some
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top