Slashdot Mirror
Sony Plans Digital Distribution?
Along with Sony's plans to take on Xbox Live, they may be planning a move to counter the Revolution's classic gaming library. GamesIndustry.biz reports that Sony may offer digital downloads of classic PSOne and PS2 titles. From the article: "In Sony's case the challenges may be significantly more difficult, since PlayStation titles were customarily several hundred megabytes in size, and PS2 titles spanned multiple gigabytes - compared to just a few megabytes or less for NES, SNES and N64 titles in the Nintendo back-catalogue. However, as Internet connections speed up downloads of this size will be far more reasonable - already, several Xbox Live demos for the Xbox 360 are over 600Mb in size - and our sources indicated that Sony may also be investigating the possibility of remastering certain PS2 titles to allow them to stream later content over the network while the player is already playing early parts of the game."
Traditionally most of the content was (red book?) audio CD's. So that aspect of it at least could be lossy compressed to go over the wire and expanded back out to make a 'virtual' CD image. Hell, the quantity of power the PS3 will have it could be done on the fly. So basically you're looking at shipping some MP3's and maybe fifty megs of data?
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
actually fairly large HDDs are relatively cheap atm. You can get a 160 gb drive for $100 CAD retail, so I imagine sony themselves would be paying less than half of that. another $40 CAD is not a dealbreaker if it adds 160gb of storage to the machine.