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Moore Calls Game Discs Ridiculous
Gamespot reports on a Churchill Club panel discussion attended by a number of industry heavyweights. They discussed, heavily, the future of gaming online and what it means for the industry as a whole. From the article: "[MS VP Peter] Moore said that the retail landscape is set to undergo a particularly drastic change of face. Even though he made a point that the current retail model was hugely important to Microsoft's plans for the near future, he sees its days as numbered. 'Let's be fair. Whether it's five, 10, 15, 20 years from now, the concept of driving to the store to buy a plastic disc with data on it and driving back and popping it in the drive will be ridiculous,' Moore said. 'We'll tell our grandchildren that and they'll laugh at us.'"
I get sick of having my first CD damaged, so I can't play a game without taking extraordinary measures. At the same time, though, I don't want to not be able to play my games locally because my ISP managed to drop the entire block.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Of course our grandparents think it is ridiculous to drive to the store and buy a plastic disc with data on it too.
Not much better than paying real money to buy a "licence" to download DRMn'd glory where I've got to register to play, can only play it on a registered System, and only that as long as the publisher doesn't go bankrupt.
Back before plumbing, people had to get buckets of water out of wells and bring them inside before they could use water. Would we consider this practice absurd?
Before the advent of speedy online delivery, we go buy games at a store before we can use it. Same concept.
Working within the technological limitations of your day is never "ridiculous." I submit that making baseless predictions about the future is ridiculous!
I buy my games from an online store that posts the games 1-3 days before release, so I get to play before anyone else.
I have zero problem with downloading software, including games. Like most people, I grab shareware and open source software online all the time. But I do want to be sure that I can retain the data I bought a copy of. I don't want to hop on a website and have to prove I bought the damn thing, and download it again if I need to reinstall my OS, or lose the game when the company I downloaded it from goes out of business for whatever reason. Driving to the store can seem like much less of a hassle than DRM locked data. Especially gigs of locked data.
Whether it's five, 10, 15, 20 years from now, the concept of driving to the store to buy a plastic disc with data on it and driving back ... will be ridiculous
It's ridiculous now, if you live in an urban area. Why not walk to the store and back? If you're able-bodied and live less than a couple of miles from the town centre, you have no excuse. No wonder the Western world is becoming so fat and lazy.
-Stephen, missing the point of the article
The more important question is: why is everyone so hell bent on killing the retail market? Was everyone tramatized by a retail store as a kid?
A great many trips to the retail store have left me with a sour taste in my mouth and an empty feeling in my wallet.
May the Maths Be with you!
There are plenty of people in the United States who live in rural areas that aren't served by any mode of broadband, and it looks unlikely that this is going to change. Current boraodband requires either coaxial cable or a close location to a telephone exchange in order to get DSL. With many phone companies dropping the installation of land lines altogether, and rural TV viewers turning to dish-based television, it's also unlikely that cable companies will bother wiring up any small outlying areas.
Aside from this, I imagine that game companies bristle at the idea of their software being pirated more easily over network delivery.
I don't think they'll be laughing. They'll be more likely in awe of the fact we actually owned a re-usable, permanent physical copy of the media we purchased rather than having to set up a bank order to transfer a monthly licence fee for the right to continue using it.
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...Yes, folks. Back then, I could simply hand over $50 and I had full first-sale rights on the game. It came as an actual physical product that looked nice sitting on the shelf, worked even round at my friend's house for co-op play without us having to buy a license each, and when we were bored of it we could make about half that money back by selling it to someone else.
I mean, can you imagine it? It's a wonder the global economy didn't crash earlier, really.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
I don't want my copy of Grand Theft Auto 4 to get remote-deleted because some script kiddy forged his IP and duped a bunch of rocket launchers.
And how am I suppose to pay? Probably by credit card. That's nice but for the major part of my game playing life I did not have one. We don't have a credit card tradition like the US has. What other options are there? Paypal? That's about as secure as letting the cat guard the milk. Other than that? Money transfer, now instead of driving to the store, buying the game and driving home, I can transfer the money and in a day or two I get to spend an hour or 2 waiting for the download to complete (which takes away almost half my ISP allowens), followed by half an hour while the game gets updated and then, perhaps, I get to the "loading" screen.
Even if I buy a game that way. How long will I have it? When they decide to end the products life, I 'll end up without my precious game. Unless, ofcourse, they, in their limitless goodness, would allow me to download an ISO.
If I could download an ISO, then sure, I'd go along, but I really doubt they would allow this. After all we're all stinkin' pirates, right?
Anybody remember the story about manifestogames.com ?
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I get the feeling that these people (yeah, the "industry icons") have some pretty Big Ideas(TM), but they don't really know what they are saying. Sure they postulate about multiplayer gaming and the disc going the way of the dodo, but these are just guesses wrapped up in verbal fluff.From TFA:
That move to digital distribution is just one in a series of transitions to a connected era the industry is currently undergoing. Moore could easily have been addressing the sum of those changes when he referred to the Xbox 360 as "a living entertainment experience powered by human energy," but it seemed every member of the panel foresaw a gaming industry where the publishers and the games themselves were much more closely integrated with the consumers.
"It [gaming] has been a mutant monster only made possible by unconnected computers.
We're not selling the bits. We're selling those other intangibles, the opportunity to feel special
Ironically, the idea with the best potential was:
"Linear entertainment in single-player is to media what masturbation is to sex,"
Even still, that was wordy and could have been trimmed down for a nice take-away thought. Perhaps, I'm cynical, but this article didn't feel like a 'discussion on the on-line future of the gaming industry'; it felt like a bunch of high-schoolers trying to come up with big, meaningful statements for their English essays.
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
Sometimes when I feel nostalgic I switch on the old Nintendo and play some Duck Hunt. I never knew there was an easter egg in Atari Adventure until 2 years ago. Pulled that out of the closet and sure enough, there it was. I like the fact that I'm not paying a monthly fee for GTA San Andreas, I'm still trying to finish that one. (OK I'm not playing for more then an hour or two a week.) I like being able to put a game down for a few weeks or revisit some old favorites years later. You can't do that on a subscription model. When games go subscription only I won't be following them into that business plan. I'm already paying enough for HBO and Internet. Oh and heat, water, sewer and electricity. I'm not adding anymore monthly recurring expenses.
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The big hang up I have with software I get online is that they usually want me to pay the same retail price as if I bought the boxed item. This forms a big disconnect in my head which essentially drives me to buy the box set instead.
One area that would certainly benefit is the mmog games. There is little real reason to buy the base software but that model is still used regardless. people with slow connections will be at a loss but even after months of release these people who do require boxed versions would be back in the same boat as many game updates easily overwhelm dialup connections. This is what probably holds back consoles with harddrives - how do you deliver games where storage isn't a given?
If the industry wants to change direction they will need to realize we will not pay the same price. Yes I know that publishers make up their money with new releases but something has got to give.
what i fear will happen is that we will be paying the box price for over the line delivery and a new upcharge for the box version. the industry will take a grand idea and exploit it in the worst possible method.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Not to sound trollish, but we can already download many applications, music in mp3 format and movies/shows ALL LEGALLY. Wouldnt it be assumed that major applications and games would follow the same concept? Companies spend a large percentage on packaging and shipping alone. A large amount of money could be saved this way.
If network and gaming trends continue as they are, video games will still be too large to download "on-demand". Notice that the only successful model of online video delivery, Apple's iTMS, only downloads reduced-resolution, iPod-sized videos. This isn't because they don't want you buying an episode of Scrubs or whatever for $2 and burning it to a DVD (and hence not buying the DVD set when it comes out), it's because we don't have the infrastructure to deliver full-resolution TV shows, much less feature films. Video games (many of them, anyway) are just as large, and keeping pace. Just because people don't mind starting up bittorrent and waiting a few hours/days for a movie doesn't mean that it's a valid distribution model. People do that because it's free--if a company tried to distribute their multi-gig program/movie/data over the internet, it would be paying far more in bandwidth costs, with nothing other than DEcreased customer satisfaction to show for it, than if it just paid a printing company and DVD fab to stamp their discs and stick in a shiny insert.
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Loan them the demo disc.
Didn't Microsoft just force an Xbox 360 upgrade that made a demo disc unplayable once the full version was for sale?
But even these other problems are overcome, the process of buying some sort of physical media is NEVER going to go away. When people pay money for something, they like to be able to hold the thing and say "I own this". The same is true of music. People want the jewel case with the nice artwork and a shiney disc. How often have you been in the store and seen people just browsing the shelf, reading the boxes and looking for something new? There is something going on here that is more than just buying data. Something that won't happen if you don't have boxes in stores.
Even if discs went away, and all content came over the net, you STILL wouldn't be rid of boxes in stores: Those boxes turn into impulse purchases.
Our grandkids may laugh at us. They will see predictions like the one in this article and laugh in the same way we laugh at the jetpacks-and-flying-cars future of the past.
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The concept of driving to the store to buy a plastic disc with data on it and driving back and popping it in the drive will be ridiculous
Isn't that what Larry Ellison, the head of Oracle, said on Triumph of the Nerds?
I'm surprised we're not there yet, to be honest. That show's ten years old now.
That's got to be the scariest concept to me: losing the ability to buy software, and having to pay recurring fees. As a big fan of replaying old games for nostalgia, will I have to continue to pay a monthly licensing fee to play Ultima 4 or Doom 2 one day? For whatever the future holds, massive change is historically filled with fear of the unknown, and rarely is it beneficial to EVERYONE. ...tho I have to wonder: even in today's *modern* world you can buy vinyl records of current music. Is it really so unlikely that we'd still have the option of buying a physical copy of the software if we chose? Even if it's a mail-order process...
So no one is going to pay for a piece of plastic.
Say it to George Lucas.
I like to keep old 5 1/4 game disks. I love it's boxes.
May be, better than a "virtual" game it's a box with merchandising in it. Or may be sell games cheaper...
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If you RTFA he basically says single player gaming is like masturbation, which I suppose could mean that it's practiced and loved by EVERYONE ... but that's not what he meant. He meant to say that multi-player gaming is the "wave of the future" and that single player games are dead. Let's think for a moment some of the biggest selling games of all time - which were all single player (not co-op, or p1 vs. p2) - Pac man, Super Mario Bros, Zelda, just to name a few. Even the GTA series are not co-op. I think he overrating the whole online player vs player gaming theory. Multiplayer online gaming can create competition out of the simplest concept, and sometimes make it fun. That doesn't mean that it's good game programming.
The real challenge in game programming is making a fun challenge that doesn't involve two humans competing against each other. Have they all just given up on AI? Have they all just given up on inventing new challenging puzzles? It's sounds like the easy way out.
All a game has to do it give two players a gun and let them try to shoot each other, and unfortunately that's what we see all too often.
I don't know what's with people and the "inconvenience" of buying a game in a store. I can go to a store ("go" as in "walk"), buy the game, take it home in less than 30 minutes. Compared to the days it takes to download all those gigabytes I wouldn't call that slow. And let's not kid ourselves, the absense of a physical medium won't lower the game prices, the savings will go straight into the publisher's pocket. Even worse, there won't be much of an incentive to have price drops because there is no stock to get rid of. Plus it'll kill importing, if a game isn't officially released in Europe you can just forget about ever getting it here.
And let's not forget ratings enforcement. How are you going to make sure the person downloading the game is old enough? That may not be an issue in the US but here in Germany it's a felony to let anyone download a game he's not old enough for.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Yes, our grandchildren will be laughing at the idea, just as we're laughing about our grandparents' leaving their home to see a movie... oh, wait ... um, how about how we're laughing at our grandparents for buying a single song instead of an album ...err, wait ... Oh! We're laughing at at our grandparents for going to a grocery store to buy food instead of ... oh damn!
This strikes me as Version 2.0 of the ideas that were being hyped back in the '90's. Remember when the idea of physical locations to buy anything was being derided as "obsolete," soon to be replaced by web stores? No one would be buying anything at a store, we'd all be buying over the Internet. Yet somehow people still are going to stores, and most of the "web only" retail businesses from that era are gone. We still buy all sorts of "obsolete" things like books.
He seems to ignore that people actually like having having their hands on a physical medium. I want the disk, I want the case, and no, I don't want to be locked into always downloading it with all the attending hassles. So no, I don't think that our grandchildren are going to be laughing at us.
The guys in this article seem to assume the internet as it currently exists will always be there, ripe and ready for their use. How can they be so sure?
The reality is the telcos in the U.S. are gearing up for a full-court press to get "their share of the pie" and could really mess things up, access-wise. If they succeed, say goodbye to the open internet as you now know it.
Businesses are furiously clamping down on any type of net access in a futile effort to keep their Microsoft-based PCs working from one hour to the next. Businesses will increasingly move towards closed intranets with extremely limited access to the general net.
Ma and Pa consumer are out big bucks for a PC which worked good for the first week, okay for the second week, slow for the third week and barely works at all at the end of the first month. They are less and less enthused with this PC/internet thing which keeps sucking money out of their bank accounts. The cure seems as bad as the injury, what will all the additional programs needed just to keep the base functionality of what they bought in the first place.
The U.S. federal government insists on retaining control of the internet but continues to show an absurd willingness to sacrifice the public good for the benefit of a few "business buddies" who give money to elected officials.
Will the internet as it currently exists still be functional five, ten years from now? That's a dicey bet at best and any business which bets the farm on internet-only access to their product is not paying attention.
Ciao.
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Stop buying lemons!!!
Didn't Microsoft just force an Xbox 360 upgrade that made a demo disc unplayable once the full version was for sale?
No, Microsoft just forced an Xbox 360 upgrade that made a kiosk demo disc (i.e. for game stores to use on their demo consoles, not sold to home users) not run on people's 360s any more, because it had incorrectly had the media flags set to allow the (signed and therefore unalterable) executables to be run from non-Xbox media. This meant that you could take a copy of the disk onto DVD-R and it would still run in your 360. Various people are experimenting with modifying the data on the disk (you can change the data files, just not the executables which are signed) to try and discover a software exploit that will enable the running of arbitrary code. MS wanted this to stop, so they blacklisted the disc in a Live update.
Here I thought from the headline the article was talking about Roger Moore, and we could expect to see a "Farenheit 360" documentary hit theaters sometime soon.
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Ah, yes... of course this will get rid of discs in a couple of years, just like the introduction of computers created the paperless office in which nothing is ever printed on dead trees anymore.
Yes, just like that.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
By offering direct download of a piece of software, the software creator can *cut out middleman* (e.g. distributor) like Fry's, BestBuy, Egghead... etc and now take on more margin/profitability for itself even though the software is the same price to the consumer.
If you pay $50 for a game, whether $40 goes to MSFT and $10 goes to cheapsoftware.com or all $50 goes to MSFT, it stills costs YOU, the consumer $50. However, now MSFT financially looks so much better and the distributor, who was counting on you buying the game from them (rather than from another distributor) is the one that's left out in the cold.
You think MSFT (or any software creator) would actually reduce the price of the software from $50 to $40 and "pass on the savings" doubt it. You'd probably get a 'convenience fee' as well.
I'm growing tired to see some big names trying to tell us what WILL be the industry.
Technology IS ALWAYS going faster and bigger ! Moore thinks that in 10 years you'll be able to Download 25-50 g ( blu-Ray capacity actually ) in an acceptable delay ? THINK AGAIN !! In 10 years... 56k modems will still be around for lots of us who are not near enough a city. EVEN if we make it to Broadband everywhere, it will still takes too much time to download your favorite games, and NO ONE likes to wait. Put a sock in it Mr. Moore.
Most famous example is one of Bill Gates :
"640k ought to be enough for everyone"
As a big fan of replaying old games for nostalgia, will I have to continue to pay a monthly licensing fee to play Ultima 4 or Doom 2 one day?
Nah, you'll just subscribe to Origin RPG Classics for $2.95 per month (including such hits as Ultima 1-6, Tangled Tales, Bad Blood, Times of Lore, 2400 AD and a 15 day trial of Origin Space Combat). iDs Doom 2 will be open source so no problem there.
The great thing will be the fact that game companies will promise full offically written emulation software to go with each subscription. Simulate EGA, VGA, 286, 386, 486. Play the games you love on the dream system you never had, or get that nostalgic feel of playing on your junker of a pc!
I already purchase games online! That's how: I go to an online store, find the game, click the purchase button, and in a matter of few hours it's available for me to install. Way faster than downloading AND with the supreme advantage of not expending any of my bandwidth!
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I've often wondered if there would be a time when all video game purchases would be "online" and going to a store to "buy" a game would be a thing of the past. I think that we are in the beginning stages of seeing that transition.
Take a look at Valve and their Steam application. There you can buy Half-Life 2 and a host of many other games, online, CD-less, and without having to drive to the store. Yes, you do have to download them, and the inital download takes time, especially if you're on a 56K modem. But Steam runs on your computer all the time, downloads in the background, and even updates itself in the background. Though the implementation of Steam was poorly done, the concept is valid and given enough time, I think they will improve it 10 fold.
I speculate that even the 56K modems will be a thing of the past in 5-10 years. Why? Consider companies like Sprint, Verizon Wireless, and other wireless companies. Wireless Broadband is becoming more and more popular, and more and more accessible. Internet clouds are increasing in popularity. Even your local Krystal burger joints have free broadband wireless capabilities. I live in a small neighborhood 30 miles east of Nashville. Some would call it backwoods. I was surprised to see just how many wireless routers were available. Now, yes, it's illegal to actually hook up to these, but if you think about it, it's not to far off when you'll be able to get broadband everywhere. So, having to download gigs and gigs of install files to play a game might not be that bad afterall.
What I see happening in the very near future are options for people. If you want to buy a game, great! Log on to our website, purchase it, and download it. But if you insist on going to the store, browse the game section. You'll see a host of game boxes available. Some might contain the instruction manual, poster, stickers, maybe even a T-shirt. But no CD's. Only a code and a web address that would allow you to download it.
Take World of Warcraft for example. I have 2 sets of CD's and even 1 DVD for install. All nicely kept in their packaging. I haven't even used them! I downloaded the World of Warcraft online, downloaded the Retail update, and downloaded the patches. Why do I have CD's? You don't even need them to play.
Farewell Game CD's... I think that they will soon be a thing of the past.
Dell offers this service. Dell Download Center
Not sure how good it is, but it's there, and they offer a lot of products. Not everything is there, but a growing number of things are.
I'm still amazed when I hear people talk of this. Why they didn't package a hard drive to the core system is beyond me. I think it was to simply be able to say "We can offer this system for $399. Oh if you want to actually save anything, you need to pay more for a hard drive."
Please...........
Why don't the game companies devise a new standard practice to handle copy protection (and take a cue from some business software developers)
My solution is to use hardware keys (or maybe RSA tags). I think it would be a more elegant solution to the problems. Also, since a software download won't come with the hardware key, the software could be programmed to allow a period of time (say 2 weeks) where the key is not necessary to allow shipment of the key. This will save wear and tear on the discs (if they exist) as well as allowing copy protection for downloaded games. I'm sure a hardware key would be more durable than a CD.
No copy protection plan is foolproof, people will continue to "patch" software to bypass the checks, but it would at least get rid of the stupid crap that goes on with validating discs (and as an added bonus, since the copy protection is on a piece of hardware, we could even make a backup copy of the software in case the original is damaged.)
You almost made half a point. Yes, it's called the Internet, but going online to buy a boxed version of a game, and having it shipped to you is just as stupid as driving to the store yourself. I think the point Moore was making was that the idea of selling games on media to be shipped around like a box of widgets is what is laughable, as you can just download the game and play it.
People slam Valve all the time, but thanks to Steam, I got Half-life 2 and the entire Half-life catalog of games for the price of one game, all without having to have a single game on CD. Some may not like it, but I call it a deal.
Games on CDs (and indeed any software on CDs) will be thought of as words hand-chiseled on stone tablets by future generations.
Jason
Plastic discs still have several big advantages for a game machine:
Downloading is great, and we'll see more of it over time. In the long-term future it may even manage to kill off the little plastic disc. But so far plastic disc technology is keeping pace with improvements in bandwidth. And its advantages -- including the ability to sell to people with slow or nonexistent net connections -- will keep it around for a long time.
I agree with you except for that shipping part and also what's with that 'buying' word.
Have you been to an arcade recently? The price that you have to pay for a few minutes of "fun" are outrageous. Now, imagine the same model being applied to the gaming industry. The first step has already been taken- monthly subscription fees. These are reasonable, considering the ongoing costs associated with maintaining servers and bandwidth. I'd argue that the next logical step is to start metering use, much like the arcade model. This is what every cash cow wannabe is pining for...pay for play. Right now, I can pop in a Prince of Persia CD and spend as long as I want messing around with it. If the proposed changes occur, I may be limited not by my ability, or my lack of interest, but by how much it will cost me.
Another issue: anything done electronically or "online" is trackable. Assuming it's not an online game, once I pick up the CD/DVD from the store (I pay cash), there is no further tie to the store, the game's publisher, or anything else. What I do, when, and for how long remains entirely my business- the way it should be.
Back in my day we used to use a cord to hook our brains up to a little socket in the wall and download anything we wanted, right into our heads, and we liked it! None of this fancy telepathy and Borg implants like you spoiled whippersnappers today! I had a nice cord too, and I wore it in a loop around my left shoulder, which was the style at the time...
"Mom! Grandpa thinks he's time-travelling again!"
I like Steam, but after ordering the silver package I discovered that I pretty much had already bought the whole Half-Life catalog.. everything but Blue Shift, which I doubt I'll ever play now..
which is totally what she said
I do see some (narrow) circumstances where non-physical-media business software and server software is viable and maybe even a good thing. It has long been the dream of major software providers to vend their wares via a mechanism that is ultra-controlled, and can be sold as a service or subscription.
That said, I have yet to see consumers (business or home users) who have said, "Gee, I wish I didn't have to worry about my software being up-to-the-second!" In the server business world, I do see folks that want easy means of updates... in the home software and entertainment world, I don't see folks that are clamoring not to have disks for their software/games. As has already been said in many comments, the control of use suddenly goes from the consumer to the producer/provider (in a disk-less system.)
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Naturally. MS would love to charge everyone a monthly fee for each game, and shut it off when you stop paying for it. It's quite sad that in 2030, you might still be able to come across a box in the attic containing an Atari 2600 and some games, and still be able to play them, but if you come across a box with an Xbox 3 (or whatever) it'll be a useless hunk of plastic.
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I realize this is offtopic, but can Slashdot get any worse at writing headlines? I'm willing to bet this is an intentional ploy to drive readership.
For an extra $5 they can implant a memory of you going to a "store" purchasing the disc. Hell, why stop there. Just have an implant that you bought, played, liked and conquered the game - much simpler than actually doing those things...
Yah, I'm sure that the business model the evil business folks would like us to follow is the one where we don't own anything. Microcrap wants to rent Word and Excel to us and try to find a paper manual in anything you buy anymore. Soon they'll be able to turn our software off or our tv's off. Heck, I forgot to take Doom 3 out of one of my disk drives and couldn't figure out why my computer wouldn't let me burn some files on another drive. I don't even want to buy games anymore with rootkits and other things done to my computer in order to allow me to play a game I bought on my computer. All part of the effort to take our stuff and our rights to do with it as we wish. Screw them.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
"The entire video game industry's history thus far has been an aberration," Koster told the audience. "It has been a mutant monster only made possible by unconnected computers. People always play games together. All of you learned to play games with each other. When you were kids, you played tag, tea parties, cops and robbers, what have you. The single-player game is a strange mutant monster which has only existed for 21 years and is about to go away because it is unnatural and abnormal."
I think I prefer single player in a lot of instances. Single player allows you to get immersed in a cohesive story, where everything happens within a world with its own logic, rules, atmosphere, etc. While multiplayer certainly has its place, it makes me shudder to think that I could play through a game like Half-Life 2 while Combine soldiers blurt out things like "im teh 1337!!!111! ur pwned111!!!11" every two seconds. It would totally destroy the experience. I want to be able to play through a game without stupid distractions like that ruining the feel of the story.
Books--physical paper & ink--are the best thing... ever.
I love having my Treo with eBooks from Project Gutenberg on it, because it's one device with multiple uses (and it doesn't look too odd carrying it around while my wife is shopping) but I would be very unhappy if that's all there was. I still spend several hundred dollars a year on "old-fashioned" books, and they're still the number one item on my Christmas and birthday wish lists.
There's a quote (I forget the exact content and author) that goes something like: If books had never been invented and someone told you you could take 3000 years of human knowledge and imagination in your pocket, you would say that was the greatest invention ever."
And so they are.
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Of course, it's kinda funny that it's Microsoft saying the little plastic disc is dead. Since they rushed the 360 to market it doesn't have a built-in next-gen drive of any sort. So I suppose all their games are going to be limited to at most 9GB for now ... which is a little more reasonable to download than 50GB. (Still not that reasonable.)
Of course, will 9GB will be sufficient for game designers? Or to cram in more features and HD graphics and 5.1 sound will they start putting content onto HD-DVD or Blu-Ray and thus force Xbox 360 owners to buy yet another external accessory? Call me a cynic, but my bet's on the latter.
Apparently the Snail-based Data Transfer Protocol (which uses a giant african snail pulling a Ben-Hur-style chariot whose wheels are two 4.7GB DVDs) has a faster data transfer rate than ADSL.
At least in terms transfer rate, walking or driving to the store is much more efficient than downloading a game over the current version of the internet, if you can walk or drive faster than a giant african snail can crawl. And face it, today's top games are no longer the size of three or four 3.5 floppies, we are talking one to four DVDs minimum, usually double-density.
A few questions for all those who bristle at the idea of downloading software because of their "right" to a physical copy:
Consider the incredible amount of resources we would save by effectively utilizing online distribution. Does your "god-given entitlement" to DRM-less software outweigh a boon to the environment?
If - heaven forbid - the publisher goes out of business and you are no longer able to play some of your old games (until you locate a patch), will you be satisfied knowing that your concession made the world a better place?
Do you make fun of people who drive S.U.V.s?
This from the guy who said game developers aren't required to support the hard drive on the 360. Suddenly we've got a soccer game that needs it for career mode, and an MMO that requires it to run at all. Now what, he's saying we have to download games we want to play? Great and all, welcome to what, 2005 (?) and Steam.
Oh wait, still need to store that data somewhere... the vast depths of the 360's limitless system ram? Or the non-existent hard drives of the Core systems?
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Whether it's five, 10, 15, 20 years from now, the concept of driving to the store to buy a plastic disc with data on it and driving back and popping it in the drive will be ridiculous
I saw an interview with Larry Ellison in 1997 where he said exactly the same thing. At the time, it sounded a bit far out, but now I think I download more software than I go to the store for.
People slam Valve all the time, but thanks to Steam, I got Half-life 2 and the entire Half-life catalog of games for the price of one game, all without having to have a single game on CD. Some may not like it, but I call it a deal.
There's a big downside. Thanks to Steam, I was forced to upgrade to a new binary for HL2 (many times, really). Unfortunately the latest binaries randomly hard-lock my system within 20 minutes of starting the game. I can't reject the upgrade, so now I'm stuck with a $50 game that doesn't work on my system and I can't resell it to someone else who may be able to use it. The only upside is that I already played the main game through once before they hosed it for me.
If this is the future of gaming, I'm out. Steam has proven to me that it's not worth giving up this much control of your hardware.
I think the issue that the article fails to notice is that games will continue to grow in size (bytes) that make them prohibitively large to download for many people. Once everyone has the capacity to download today's 4gig games, the games will actually be up to 50gig. Plastic discs of bits will continue to be the most feasible delivery for a large demographic, and many people who do download will still want to back them up to disc to make sure they don't have to download a second time.
We just got a Nintendo Game Cube for Christmas, and we actually took it right back to the store without even opening it. We just looked at the side of the box and saw the same Mario they've been selling us since what, 1992? We traded it in, amongst other things, for a web programming book for my spouse's site design, a Python programming book for me, some hardware. Games? We snarf LLGP or Wolvix and play that on the PC. Linux gaming is finally showing signs of coming into it's own!
the concept of driving to the store to buy a plastic disc with data on it and driving back and popping it in the drive will be ridiculous
That day came and went 5 years ago for me. I'm a gamer and I've purchased all my computer games online since 2001. I've not stepped in a gaming store since then. The plastic disc comes to me, instead of me going to it.
1) Games were only a CD
2) You know exactly what you want
Having the box lineup in stores is great when I kind of know I want a game, and I am out and about in the mall or something. It's nice being able to look at all the boxes and make a choice. Also, it's great getting a real manual, poster, etc. Sure, less and less games are doing this, but if you download your game, you will get nothing.
and are killing his subscription-service model.
Face it, I don't "drive to the store" to buy a disk.
I go to the concert and buy the CD or DVD from the band directly, so that they get 50 percent of the money I pay instead of 1 or 2 cents per disk.
Or I buy it at cool record stores like we have in Fremont in Seattle which give more of the money to the local bands and have them play in the stores sometimes, like Sonic Boom Records.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Wait, we already do that! Welcome to the future, bloke!
You just got troll'd!
In a similar fashion to steam, arena-net already allows for the game to be bought online and downloaded, the nice difference being download on demand.
for example, i download the thin client from the website, it installs some base files (and really only the bare minimum) then at every loading screen a little more is downloaded until all the content is on your computer.
i don't have to pay for it monthy, i dont see why *all* future models are assumed to be pay monthly for the right to own models
i can see steam like clients beccoming more and more common, but until we get faster net connections, theres just no way of easly streaming that much content.
The Disk isnt dead yet
Steam convinced me not to play Half Life anymore (or, occasionally, to install the latest pre-steam edition and play that) and, more importantly, not to buy Half Life 2. Apparently people playing cracked versions of Half Life 2 get a better version, but I am not going to buy a game that needs to be cracked to be usable, hence I play other things instead.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"When people actually owned things and didnt have to pay every month for everything?"
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Call me paranoid, but this sounds like a small part of Microsoft's overall strategy to move from single-purchase to subscription based software. Give it a couple decades, but I'm sure that ideally they want consumers to be paying a monthly fee for Office, Windows, etc. This just sounds like another cog in that giant machine...
"Put your message in a modem, and throw it into the cyber-sea." - Rush
Guild Wars is a great example...There are hard boxes/CDs on the racks in the stores, but GW also has available a tiny (61k I think) client installer for download, and all subscription, activation, and content download can then be done online. This was a pure impulse buy on a cold, bored, rainy day in my study, that I never would have done if I had to drive out to a store and purchase a box. The sheer convenience of doing this means that I have been spending more on games recently through Valve, and other direct sites. People are worried about the permanence of their media, but realistically most of my old CD games are unplayable now due to obsolete OSs, device drivers, and I treat the purchase of ANY software these days as "caveat emptor" with no surprises that I won't be able to use it in 5 years.
----- And all that the Lorax left here in this mess was a small pile of rocks, with one word...UNLESS.
That's retarded. Solitaire has been around for ages. Also, occasionally I just want people to leave me the hell alone. We may be social animals but we all want to relax and have some "me time" too.
Also, from experience, people really enjoy being the hero. Any kind of multiplayer game makes you just like everyone else. And you know what? Being like everyone else sucks. Sometime it's nice to relax and be the super child with Jedi skills or the child that will be king.
Just an example but I ran a DikuMUD and converted the entire D&D style game to a Star Wars theme. Of course everyone wanted to be a Jedi. So all you had were hundreds of Jedis running around which diminished the power of a Jedi. Nobody was special.
Yeah I know these types of articles are meant to be controversial for the sake of getting nods and shakes by /.'ers, but damn... What a stupid comment.
... for the past two weeks I've been checking for landmines everytime I wake up and my head feels like someone called for arty.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
"[MS VP Peter] Moore said that the OS landscape is set to undergo a particularly drastic change of face.
'Let's be fair. Whether it's five, 10, 15, 20 years from now, the concept of driving to the store to buy a plastic disc with Windows on it and driving back and popping it in the drive and having your computer pwned within 5 minutes will be ridiculous,' Moore said. 'We'll tell our grandchildren that and they'll laugh at us.'"
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Buy lemons? Why do that? Apparently "Life" hands them out for free!
Live forever, or die trying.
I have to agree. I buy almost all of my software online these days, and was SHOCKED that couldn't buy a license for WOW online. You can't buy a massivly multiplayer ONLINE game online?
My friend gave me the disks to install with, and why not? It's a subscription service to start with. The idea that I then had to pack up and go to the store and buy a copy was absurd.
Heck, I didn't even think you'd have to pay for the software, since it's an online monthly fee anyway, just roll the cost of the software into the online fee and be done with it.
In the end I did have to go to the store, just so I could have the license code off of the disk sleeve. I've never actually used my disks, or even read the box.
And think of the viral-marketing referral that went on there.
Have you been to an arcade recently?
Been to? I haven't even seen an arcade recently.
When I was a teen, there were three within walking distance of my home. They all went out of business thanks to the rise of consoles and (in particular) on-line PC gaming.
Pay-for-play is a dead model in gaming until somebody comes up with an experience that's worth spending extra on. Why would any kid blow their lunch money on arcade games anymore when they can play for free at their friend's house on the Playstation or X-Box their friend got for Christmas?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
From the article: "The single-player game is a strange mutant monster which has only existed for 21 years and is about to go away because it is unnatural and abnormal."
Let's see, solitaire has apparently existed since at least 1674, with other single-person "games" possibly as old as 1535. Seems older than 21 years.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Physical movement of media give high latency transmission, but high and readily expandable throughput. For some applications, you still can't beat sneakernet.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
The single-player game is a strange mutant monster which has only existed for 21 years and is about to go away because it is unnatural and abnormal.
...
Damn, I though patience and the Times Crossword were older than that. Not to mention knucklebones, hopscotch, tops, pachinko, pinball,
Call me "old school" but there's something great about having the box with its manual, its cloth map, its artwork, etc. Sometimes digital representations of these things are not as satisfying as physical ones.
Something Witty Goes Here
This approach is being favoured by games companies as a back-door way of making sure that you're not running a pirate copy by having the game authenticate over the net every time you run it.
This means you won't be able to play unless you're connected to the net.
Unfortunately MS Windows sucks so bad it needs reinstalling every few months otherwise it gets bloated. So now imagine the additional pain of having to download several gigabytes per game every time you reinstall windows.
And now what about if the company goes bust or decides not to host your purchased game any more? You can't play it any more.
The promised paperless office? Same thing.
this has got to be a troll, but I'll bite...
Ma and Pa consumer are out big bucks for a PC which worked good for the first week, okay for the second week, slow for the third week and barely works at all at the end of the first month.
I think you're exaggerating just a tad.
They are less and less enthused with this PC/internet thing which keeps sucking money out of their bank accounts.
Honestly, what color is the sky in your world? Most consumers I know (and I'm not limiting myself to the 18-30 age bracket in a large city) are demanding more access to stores, banks, utility companies, government, etc. through the Internet. Broadband is going places I never would have expected it (and at speeds that still surprise me), because there's a demand. Since the mid-90's, I haven't heard a single person say that the Internet is overated and their computer was a waste of money.
Yep, smart guy there. Who would have thought that in up to 20+ years, kids will hate to buy data on discs when they can download it? Hell, anyone who uses a modern computing platform (read: Debian on broadband) knows that discs are already prehistoric.
Of course, whether you buy Moore's reasons for saying it is another question entirely. I'll bet he's selling something. Maybe just his own astounding crystal balls, or maybe he's trying to talk up MS's plans for massive online subscription incomes.
There are a couple of firms already offering these services. I have considered using Direct2Drive to buy games a couple of times. However I was turned away by two things:
1. When a game is patched, you have to wait for Direct2Drive to release a special version of the patch for your downloaded copy. This creates an annoying delay where you won't be able to play the same version of the game as everyone who bought a boxed copy. Also, there is no guarantee Direct2Drive will provide timely patches for older games.
2. The price is no lower than retail. While you do save sales tax and shipping, I don't see why there shouldn't be at least a minimal reduction in price since you aren't going to receive the physical disc and manual. (in fact, the three games currently advertised on Direct2Drive's home page - F.E.A.R., Empire Earth 2, and Everquest 2, are all available for several dollars less at Amazon right now!)
I don't believe someone got that reference! We stayed up so late during the summer at my bud's cottage copying out Asylum for TI, line for line, from a 99er mag (or at least I think it was in 99er??). Those were the days (before girls).
Who's got the Asylum source code now?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
You must live in a small town. Here in Phoenix (and in other large cities), there's a Gameworks, which is a very large arcade.
Why would you go to an arcade? Because there's games there that you simply can't play at home, like the popular DDR (Dance Dance Revolution), and various other games requiring specialized equipment. My favorite game there is Sky Pirates, where you sit in a chair facing three large projection screens stacked vertically, about 2 stories tall. You control a balloon, and try to pop the other players' balloons. As your balloon moves up and down the composited screen, your chair moves up and down as well.
There's also some simulation games where you sit in a "car" that moves around as you play.
Games like this simply don't compare to something you play at home on your TV, and never will, no matter how powerful they make the hardware in consoles.
Yeah, I can see it now...
ME: When we wanted to transfer money between accounts we had to use this thing called PAPER and we'd all learn by reading through hundreds of sheets of this paper in things called BOOKS and we even used this "paper" to wipe ourselves (apologies to "Demolition Man")!
MY GRANDKIDS: Wow! HAHAHA! That's RIDICULOUS!
ME: Yeah, and there was no Internet so if you wanted to send people things you had to give it to the MAILMAN and he'd drive it all the way across the country or the world in a TRUCK , or it'd go in an AIRPLANE!
MY GRANDKIDS: WOW! HAHA! Grandpa what's a truck?
ME: We used to have these things called AUTOMOBILES. Even after we had better technology we kept using these things to travel because we all loved to drive so much that we refused to let global positioning satellites guide us to our destinations!
MY GRANDKIDS: WOW! HAHAHA!
ME: Yep, and there used to be this thing called cancer, we got rid of that eventually. Get this, it used to cost us like $500 BILLION just to send ONE space shuttle to places as nearby as the friggin' MOON! And, you won't believe this, that $500 BILLION space shuttle, you could only use it like once or twice before you had to throw it away!
MY GRANDKIDS: WOW! HAHAHHAA! We learned E=MC^2 in kindergarden! HAHAH!
ME: Oh, and get this, I saved the WEIRDEST thing for last -- we used to have to drive to the stores to buy these plastic optical discs that had our videogames on them!
MY GRANDKIDS: Uhh, that's uh...that's nice...
... that we have to insert the bloody CD every time we want to load a game, just because some idiots at the publishers think that it's a tradition or an old charter or something to annoy the the honest customer like that (I have been told that some of them think that it prevents illegal copying, but people who think so would probably suffocate because they'd be too stupid to breathe, so I doubt that this is the real reason).
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
So long as local distribution forms a significant part of the market, we won't see all the benefits of online distribution. But as soon as enough people can buy online to make a product a success, it's bye-bye Best Buy.
It's already happening in the music market. Prince sold "Crystal Ball" online in 1998, bypassing Warner, and made more money on it in the process. Indie bands do it all the time. It's happening with computer parts too - cheaper online.
Shareware (e.g. Doom) started the process for software, now Steam is taking it further. It is inevitable - but you can certainly expect some problems along the way.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Once online distribution is big enough that the (greater) profits outweigh the smaller market, they can afford to tell Wal-Mart where to go, and compete on price. Until then, there's no way they're going to undercut their own biggest distributors.
Sucks for us, but the best thing you can do to bring about change is to buy online. Show them that we don't need the middlemen any longer.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Even Steam allows you to play Half-Life 2 in a completely offline mode - whether Valve are still extant or not.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You can sell HL2 to someone else. The CDkey can be unregistered (but I think Valve charges for that, damn greedy bastards).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
What he obviously mean is Xbox Live service, with a whole bunch of vendor lock ins etc.
I also have been annoyed for years by broken CD's or worse, Keep CD's in cd drive to play game annoyances.
CD's gone as medium? Nah. CD's gone as 'protection' I sure hope so. Forget the CD's. CD's (with the game in question) should be purchasable for next to nothing and also available as downloadable ISO's. No more 'please insert disc to play' schemes. It's not about the CD anymore. All you have to do is purchase a key. True, you'd depend on the internet for short periods (verifying your key from time to time) but not only is that the only true way of banning out piracy, only valid keys are useable, but it would make life a lot easyer. Also you can lock a key to (email) address, and not your harddrive serial number or some lame bull. That if you loose your key, you can always re-get it. I think games like WoW actually, slowly are moving towards that direction. True you still have to pay the boxset for 35E to start with, which is somewhat of a downer still, but they don't have any cd copy protection bull, so install, and store.
So do I agree with the dude, since it's MS, i'm pretty sure I don't. They just wanna lock you in and glue you down.
if you spent 20 hours playing an arcade game it would cost you hundreds of dollars. for $20-$40 on a domestic game you get hours and hours of game play.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons