Quote:
Originally Posted by korme
However, the downloading aspect could be speedier. It was nice buying Skyrim and playing almost instantly since I got a disc.
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And that's the thing, yeah? We haven't got the infrastructure to support regular 50 GB game downloads outside of, like, major urban areas, and not everybody who games voraciously is living in Chicago or NYC or whatever.
So, I mean, the Day of the Digital is coming, yeah. Intellectually I acknowledge that, even if personally I prefer physical media.
But it's not here yet. Right now, it's kind of a newborn colt, still covered in birth juices, staggering around looking for its mother.
For console manufacturers to be able to leverage the existing digital business model, two things need to happen:
1) ubiquitous, low-cost broadband capable of downloading 40-50 GB games in minutes instead of hours
2) Larger internal hard drives in general, and for Microsoft to stop being a little bitch about user-driven hard drive upgrades and follow in Sony's footsteps.
I don't think 1) is imminent, and addressing 2) doesn't really address the issue that the purchase price of the console ends up being a down payment of sorts - which, people who buy consoles often do so
because they're plug-and-play, without the need for future upgrades.
So what I think we're going to see instead on digital, long-term, is something akin to PS Now. Not necessarily a subscription service, but purchasing a license for a new game and streaming it when you want to play it, with a digital 'bookshelf' of sorts containing your games. Most people with broadband internet (excluding satellite internet folks, sorry) are going to have a connection capable of streaming a
Fallout-type game, but not everybody is going to have the sort of connection that would allow for pain-free downloads of games that size.
I suspect we'll see something like that emerge in the next 3-5 years. It fits with the simplicity console owners want from their machines, and it does an end run around the infrastructure concerns.