Full Steam Ahead: How Digital Will Kill the Disc

[Lonewolfm16]

I'm not comfortable with everything being digital; then we're just one EMP/gamma ray burst/solar flare/spilled cup of coffee away from total loss of everything.

Trust me, its far more likely that you will mess up and lose the disk/key codes than that a massive corporation would suffer total systems loss. Most of the data would be really well backed up, and losing your clients libraries would be a PR disaster, so you can bet they are trying to keep everything safe. Meanwhile if your house burns down, there go your physical copies.

 

[Ian Kapsthan Frost]

I'm not comfortable with everything being digital; then we're just one EMP/gamma ray burst/solar flare/spilled cup of coffee away from total loss of everything.

Trust me, its far more likely that you will mess up and lose the disk/key codes than that a massive corporation would suffer total systems loss. Most of the data would be really well backed up, and losing your clients libraries would be a PR disaster, so you can bet they are trying to keep everything safe. Meanwhile if your house burns down, there go your physical copies.

Although I would generally agree that total system losses are very unlikely, I still don't see them as the biggest threat either. What if my account gets banned on cheating accusations, or because I changed my IP to get content not available in my region, or some other arbitrary reason? I really don't expect anyone to refund me for a digital library if that happened, no matter how much money I spent on it.
Also, what if the company went bankrupt? I know that Steam said that they would remove DRM on all games if something like that happened, but that is hardly a guarantee, and I'm not sure if other companies would even consider that.
And the scenario doesn't even have to be that extreme. Servers for multiplayer games get shut down all the time, and the EA-Darksopre issue could be a sign that this might happen with single player games as well (even though everything worked out in the end with Darkspore, at least for now).

Unless digital games are entirely DRM free there will essentially always be risks that I, as a user, cannot really control.

And yes, I know that my place could burn down, or get robbed (although I doubt anyone would steal a truckload of video games), but either way I would at least get insurance money, even if not that much.

There will always always always be people who want physical copies of their games. Sure digital is all well and good. Like if you have a house fire that wipes out all your games, It be nice to have a digital copy. Look at what CDProject Red did with witcher 2. I bough a hard copy of the game and got the digital one free. More of that would be a nice gesture from companies but you know how that goes.

This would be a truly great solution if more developers/publishers would go with it. Especially if the hard copy is DRM free.

 

[EvilRoy]

Also, silly article is silly, digital will become more acceptable I can concede that, but discs are never going to die. I just can't see a day coming where gaming is a completely digital thing.

Maybe that notion is born from my own hopes/fears though. Can someone remind me the name of that game the Escapist ran the story on a while back, some EA game I think it was, couple of years old, EA won't fix their crippled servers, so now the game literally cannot work?

Yeah. Imagine that but for an entire generation of gaming.

I can't speak to consoles, but on PC the transition to full digital is already well on its way. You can buy stuff on disk still sure, but chances are you're going to need a UPlay, Steam, Origin, Battlenet, ect. account to be able to use the game. If those services stop there is a chance that game will stop working as well.

Having a physical copy doesn't protect you from any of that, it just makes the download go faster since you only need to grab the patches not on the disk.

They tried to mandate this on the new xb, but it got slapped down as you probably remember. It is entirely feasible, though, that individual game developers will place requirements on their games for internet access, or an xbl account or what have you to play their game, making it effectively the same as the current climate on PC.

 

[Kenjitsuka]

"and say: "Halo 5? It plays better on disc." "

Sadly, things never play better on disc, because CD-,DVD- and Bluray readers are just so much slower than HDD's.
Once SDD's completely replace HDD's there won't even BE games that can work from a disc, since loading times will be minutes (if trends continue and all becomes in memory/SSD as a standard they WILL cram so much visual crap on screen loading TONS of bytes)

 

[Strazdas]

I find it quite ironic thats americans, who statistically have the largest living spaces in the world, double the space for average person than europeans, and up to 5 times for eastern countries, are complaining about storage space.
This is not the driving factor for digital games, unless you hoard thousands of them and need a special room. besides, lets not ignore people who trade in the games after a month or so. those hardly keep more than 20 boxes at any given time.

Interestingly enough, as much as we love our preowned market, it does have a significant impact on how quickly new game costs go down.

But thats not preowned markets fault. that is fault solely of game developers, that they make games that people buy, play once (for 5 hours) and want to sell it. If they made games people wanted to keep, preowner marked wouldh ave no supply to begin with. There is very little Nintendo games in preowned market, because thats games people want to keep (i personally dont like them, but thats a good example nonetheless). It is dominated by couple hour linear campaign games, and for good reason.

The statistics I just looked up seemed to say that in north america, there is 25-30 broadband subscriptions for every 100 people, and everybody else gets the truck driver's salute? Ya, I don't see it. Not anytime soon, especially not for 40 gig games, that shit would take me 7 hours to download, and I live in a major city with upgraded internet.

During the whole Xbone DRM discussion a lot of statistics were dug up. The msot recent and reloable one said that only recently america has reached 60% broadband coverage. Though one has to remember, americas internet is in extremely poor state compared to the rest of the world, and while it is a largest gaming market, it is not the only one.
Also have you ever though of press download, go to sleep, wake up and play the game? or are you that impatient that you waited for months and cant wait another 7 hours, sleeping none-the-less?
i have the cheapest plan available here. 40 gigs would take Around 1:45 to download (provided downlaod is at maximum tecnical speed, it fuctuates above and bellow a bit sometimes), so basically i could watch a movie and then go play it.

Another thing to consider, that comparing internet acessible households to consoles sold, there are over 40.000 times more houses with internet than hosuees with consoles, even if we ignore posibility of same household buying two Xboxes (due to RRods) and so on. it is very likely that most people that do not have internet, are not interested in gaming consoles to begin with.

"and say: "Halo 5? It plays better on disc." "

Sadly, things never play better on disc, because CD-,DVD- and Bluray readers are just so much slower than HDD's.
Once SDD's completely replace HDD's there won't even BE games that can work from a disc, since loading times will be minutes (if trends continue and all becomes in memory/SSD as a standard they WILL cram so much visual crap on screen loading TONS of bytes)

I agree with your post fully, but i woudl like to say that SDD is still a LONG way for replacing HDDs. it is unrealiable, msot real life reports state that their lifetime is around 1 year, which is simply unacceptable. But that is design flaw, and needs a major overhaul of the system and not minor tweaking. Secontly it is still ridiculously expensive per gygabyte of storage space comapred to HDDS. i woudl rather see a server designed 12000 RPM HDDs being placed there (and home computers, i wish i had one) than HDDs as they are now.

So SDD wont happen soon. not even the generation after the PS4s probably. unless they be even more retarded now and wait even more than 7 years.

and high-speed internet in more areas (running on an 80kb/s connection. Downloading/streaming doesn't work too well) since places with decent (and reliable) high-speed connections are NOT the norm.

In america they are not, granted. That is because americas internet provuiders is a monopolistic leeches that havent done squat in 20 years. you get the worst internet in first world, while paying the most for it. Though i guess this is partly due to american way of thinking that "any govenment interference = communism = evil". i just hope google fiber woul hurry up, though they cant, they acutally got sued by the monopolies because "They would bring competition we cannot compete with". well whos fault is that?
Here in lithuania only people who live in one-house villages (not sure how to express it in english, there is one house in the middle of the place, soft of like the cliche version of a farm, but old and rotten) would have no acess. we got over 98% coverage and due to competition and government regulation it is reliable (over the past 10 years i have used services of 2 providers and my internet has crashed a total of like 10 times. thats once per year. most of them are restored within an hour. coupe took them half a day. one took longer, thats becasue the cable switcher that switched internet to each flat from the mastercable has shapped the mastercable in half). now of course this is example of a country that by some ratins rates as the fastest internet in the world. but it is certainly possible future everywhere. and lets not forget this article we are talking future. long term future.

 

[medv4380]

Digital's not killing anything any time soon. The VIEW that Boarders didn't go Digital fast enough, and was going to die in the future killed Boarders. I'm not saying digital killed Boarders. They just panicked at the thought. Now Barns and Nobel is suffering because it DID go digital, and was seen as winning because of it. However, now it's desperate to get ride of the money sink it created with eBooks.

All Digital is a fad that can kill you as a company. I was hoping MS would continue down the train wreck they painted so they could be made an example of, but we'll have to see who gets in line to jump off the cliff next.

 

[Lightknight]

1. HDD Space: Current gen games are ever ballooning and may start exceeding 50GB marks once disks become a non-issue. This problem is currently being sidestepped by Steam by having persisting library that may be installed and uninstalled as desired. HDD storage is also rapidly increasing and is already stable in the TBs.

The install/uninstall thing is largely mitigated by internet limitations.

That's probably why Number 1 includes the sentence: "This problem is currently being sidestepped by Steam by having persisting library that may be installed and uninstalled as desired."

But perhaps you're just agreeing wiht me there. Unless you're talking about internet caps in other countries or ridiculously low speeds in the US. Then it's questionable. We're just talking about overall space so deleting a local game that you haven't played in years isn't bad because of the whole digital library thing. It just used to be that unless you had the disk, anything you lost on an HDD was gone, gone, gone.

2. HDD reliability: If the HDD is lost or damaged, you lose everything on it. Steam is also sidestepping this by keeping a persisting library. Something like Amazon would not recover the lost file.

All my Amazon games are re-downloadable. Save files are still at issue, I guess.

Ah, did not know that. Thanks. I've never had to but I didn't think they kept track of my digital downloads. How do they know I'm not downloading it on a hundred other systems? What I meant is any service that just gives you a file to download rather than a library to pull on at any time.

3. Internet Infrastructure: Steam and PSN and MS Live can have all the best server farms in the world but there's one thing they don't have control over. The internet speed that the ISP gives its customers. Unless you live where Google Fiber is offered, chances are you're getting around 15 mbps or less. So a 20GB game is a signicant waiting period. A 40GB game (like Uncharted 3 is) can take 17 hours of continuous download time (as it did me). That does not include installation time. In that time, I could have driven to a store, purchased the game and driven back home and already be finished with the entire game before the download finished. Once this gets resolved, DVDs/Blurays/CDs will all be a thing of the past as long as legitimate online services offer a reasonable alternative.

Bandwidth caps are another issue. When you're only allowed a couple hundred GB a month, a 50+ GB game is a notable chunk and it's just one. I don't know how much people generally uninstall and reinstall games, but that could be kind of a big deal. Especially since the main reason they instate bandwidth caps is to prevent having to actually spend money on expanding infrastructure. In the future, I imagine Google fiber will spread and generate competition, but that's a while off unless you're in MO or (probably soon) one of the largest cities. In the meanwhile, I doubt they're shaking in their boots.

Yeah, in my opinion this is the only real issue in the way of an all digital future. The other items can be an inconvenience, but this one is the real one.

4. Price: Yes, Steam is practically unbeatable during its sales. However, when no sale is afoot we can often get a better deal in the preowned market. Also, a borrowed game is free, but that's not going to keep storefront's doors open.

You can find comparable prices quite often by looking around the other digital game fronts. Of course, you may give up Steam benefits from that.

It depends on the game. You can usually find the game cheaper early on in a store front than online. But not by enough for me to care about that. But it's more around the mid-range pricing of the product that I'm talking about. When you can find the game for $20 or less preowned in stores but all digital copies still stick around at the top mid-range price (you know, because there's no preowned here).

. Tactile: As you stated, analogue does feel better. It helps consumers feel better about spending $60 on a file. This is something we simply need to overcome. Perhaps it's a natural trait that helps us not get suckered into bad deals like being paid double two days from now for a burger today.

Or, you know, we could price things accordingly. That would be MADNESS, I suppose.

haha, Excellent post.

 

[Machine Man 1992]

I'm not comfortable with everything being digital; then we're just one EMP/gamma ray burst/solar flare/spilled cup of coffee away from total loss of everything.

Trust me, its far more likely that you will mess up and lose the disk/key codes than that a massive corporation would suffer total systems loss. Most of the data would be really well backed up, and losing your clients libraries would be a PR disaster, so you can bet they are trying to keep everything safe. Meanwhile if your house burns down, there go your physical copies.

In order:

-I hate disc key codes with a passion, as they rendered my copy of Tachyon: The Fringe useless
-That never stopped Sony. If it happened to them, it can happen to anyone.
-Fire proof safe. I keep everything worth more than twenty bucks in one.

But I am really old fashioned when it comes to electronics so..eh.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

Sure it will in the next 10ish + years. There are just to many people offline to ignore.

 

[anteater123]

Personally, I'm not persuaded by the floor space argument. I live in a major city in a 700 square foot apartment (that I pay $766 a month for), which is not exactly huge, but big enough that I have a massive game collection worth about $15,000 (as recent as the Wii U and going all the way back to a Magnavox Odyssey and pretty much everything in between) that takes up about four bookshelves and leaves plenty of room left over for a huge collection of books and movies. It would be much more difficult to have this collection if I were in a more expensive city but such places are the exception and not the rule. It's true that either through emulators or legitimate downloads, I could digitize nearly my entire collection, but it's just not the same and there are a couple of reasons why:

First, call me a hipster, but nothing beats the experience of playing the original game on the original system. I have a lot of classic NES, SNES and N64 games on my Wii but after I started building my classic collection I went out and bought original copies of all the games I downloaded because the original experience is just so much better. Playing Super Mario World on a Gamecube controller is pretty much impossible (the classic controller works much better) but there is nothing like playing it on a SNES with an original controller. And while I'm sure pretty much everyone here has played Pong before, trust me when I say that you have not played Pong until you've played it on a 40 year old Odyssey with a plastic lanyard taped to a vacuum tube TV to give it some graphical flair.

Second (and this is the big one), my physical games are a commodity. I'm doing pretty well financially right now but I have known tough times in the past and don't have so much confidence in the future that I believe I'm immune from knowing tough times again. If I ever find myself in desperate circumstances I could live for several months just by selling off my videogame collection. It would be an incredibly painful thing to have to do, but if I had to I could do it. If my entire collection were digitized though, I would have nothing to fall back on, except maybe the hard drives I had my collection on (which I could probably sell for a couple hundred dollars). Furthermore, collectible games have, overall, increased in value by 50% in the last 5 years and, based on similar collectible markets, I see no reason for that to change. And don't bother trying to tell me that digital downloads of classic games will destroy the collector's value of the original versions because it's not true. I could cite about a hundred examples but just to give one compelling one: when Wild Guns for the SNES became downloadable on the Wii Shop channel for $8 a cartridge copy sold for about $90. Now cartridge copies sell for about $220 despite the fact that you can still download it for $8 on the Wii. It makes perfect sense if you actually stop to think about it for a minute: does the fact that reprints and downloadable copies of Action Comics #1 are readily available change the fact that an original copy still sells for over a million dollars? There's nothing special about owning a reprint or a download, but to have an original is a hell of a thing. The most valuable game I own is a copy of Peek-a-Boo Poker for the NES. It currently sells for about $900 (five years ago it sold for about $400) and by sheer dumb luck I managed to get my copy for the bargain-bin price of $435. I know a lot of people who would laugh at me and call me an idiot for spending that much money on a game I could easily go and download on one of the dozens of NES emulators on the internet for free, but given the rate games of that rarity are appreciating, I expect a day will come that I will be able to sell my copy for thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars (comic book collectors familiar with the Mile High Collection know what I'm talking about) while the emulated copy will always be worth just as much as what you originally paid for it: nothing.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Digital downloads are the future, but maybe not for the reason you think.

An interesting read, but you appear to be unaware that the majority of the world's internet infrastructure is not capable of handling a purely digital distribution system. Digital may be the future, but that future is decades away.

 

[Pinkscare]

I love digital. However, like stated by others, I wish I owned what I purchased.

 

[yamy]

By your reasoning. Robert, everyone who plays games in Hong Kong would be using Steam.

I live there. They aren't. Lots of people still play consoles. Hell many people stills goes to play games in Arcades which takes up ridiculous amounts of space. There's definitely much more of an arcade culture than say, many parts of the UK (which I've also lived in) and it's still deemed as a popular thing to do for teenagers. By you floor space argument, nobody would be playing arcades and everyone should be either on Steam or playing exclusively on their phones.

Honestly, anyone who can afford to fit a PC/consoles and a TV in their home can fit a few plastic boxes next to it. Unless our living spaces shrink down to the size of a Japanese capsule hotel "room" (which I don't see happening in 20 years, not even HK...not quite anyway) the space problem is really a none-issue.

You also seem to forget that many gamers don't actually own that many games. Especially console gamers. People with Wiis with only Wii Sport or people who only play Fifa/Cod probably makes up the majority of the market. Hardcore gamers with 100+ game libraries are relatively rare, especially if you live somewhere with trade-ins being available.

Your point that kids nowadays growing up being used to the notion of downloading games makes much more sense than the rest of your article. Neither of my parents are comfortable with the notion of buying things online yet whilst I hunt for deals regularly and neither of them have ever bought music online.

Digital will be the future. Space may be part of the reason, but it will not be THE reason. Not by a long shot.

 

[zombflux]

I haven't bought a game disc since I bought Half-Life 2 at Target all those years ago..

STEAM sales show a game's true value

 

[piinyouri]

I'm not comfortable with everything being digital; then we're just one EMP/gamma ray burst/solar flare/spilled cup of coffee away from total loss of everything.

I'm just being nitpicky here and I imagine you probably know this too, but if we're ever "one anything" away from a gamma ray burst, wee very very likely won't need to worry about losing all our electronic data. : p

 

[Verlander]

That's the story in many cities, and we're not even discussing a truly insane market like Manhattan, where people will charge $300 for a breakfast nook with a bed in it.

Read more at http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/criticalintel/10478-Full-Steam-Ahead-How-Digital-Will-Kill-the-Disc#OM9clkV1yUhqqHuF.99

Cry me a river - I've checked right now, and in the City of London the cheapest room costs £195 per week ($298). Just under four times that price. Kitchen and bathroom are communal.

Space has always been an issue in the UK - we suffer the smallest homes in the western world. Perhaps it's your expectations that need to drop? Not every country has American oversized poorly built houses littered across the landscapes.

The population density of Hong Kong is 16,576/sq mi
The population density of London is 13,690/sq mi
The population density of Austin is 3,262.86/sq mi

You can hardly compare these figures. On average, new world-ers have a ton of space at their disposal. Yet, all us old world-ers have always managed juuuuust fine with our media. If you judge your flat by the amount of empty space in it, that's fine, but it's not why "Steam will kill the disk".

My issue has been, and always will be, that when you buy something, you should receive something. Otherwise you are renting it. On a server, it is the server that has your purchase, not you. It's the same as "adopting an animal in the zoo" or "buying land on the moon". You've not bought anything, and that feeling doesn't sit right with many people. When you buy a game on Steam can you back a full playable copy up on an external hard drive? If no, then tell me what the fuck you've bought.