I've been thinking a lot lately about how physical copies of games are just being phased put, because the pro list usually ends up shorter than the one for digital downloads. I'm sure we've all gone through that in our heads at some point, so let's not dwell on that.
What I'm wondering is why do they not sell games on USB-sticks? Seriously! There are sooo many advantages to this, here's a few that I've thought about:
1) There are virtually no games these days that need to be installed. Most of the installation is just about unpacking the files and adding a couple of registry entries, and create a shortcut on the desktop. If the game was sold on a USB-stick it would be pre-installed, and the "installation" would take only a few seconds.
2) As a result, the game occupies no space on your harddrive. none. and you will never have to experience that feeling of wanting to play an old game you haven't touched for 2 years - only to realize it's no longer installed. best case scenario you have the disc and it'll only take a few minutes to install. worst case scenario it's a digital download, and will take 1-2 hours to download and install. yay.
3) The savegames are ALWAYS there, where you want them. when you want them.
4) you can bring your favourite game to a friend and play there without hazzle
5) copy protection of discs rarely work anyhow, and with most new games requiring an internet connection and registration on some account the copy-right issue is not relevant
There used to be technological problems with this - the game would simply be too expensive - but I can't see that being an issue any longer. A 16GB USB memory costs about 200kr nowadays, and that's when the store wants to make a profit of it. The actual cost of the materials and the production are a lot less.
the usb is kinda slow, but with 3.0 coming along that won't be an issue either. it's probably a bit more expensive, granted, but I'm not even sure you need 3.0... PCs nowadays have so much memory that they can load the files far in advance and store them in the RAM
But most importantly (for retailers at least) this is pretty much the only thing that would convince me to cough up those extra hundreds for a physical copy.
3 comments:
Sloooooooooow.
Seriously.
Crazy slow.
Not sure what the price is for a standard simple drive with USB 3.0, but 2.0 is useless.
You can't hold the entire game in the RAM, so you'll need to load from the drive often, which is (once again) crazy slow. SATA runs at 3-6 GBit/s, USB 2.0 at less than 0.5. This increases loadtimes immensely. IF you can hold the entire game on the RAM, somehow, it'll take forever to start because it needs to move several gigabytes to the RAM.
With USB 3.0 it is very possible, but I can't see why someone would want to pay 50% more for the game (assuming the very generous estimate of 200 sek per drive) for the game, instead of downloading it. Over time, that minor convenience adds up to a lot of games you could have bought instead.
You're right at the speeds but its not the carrier(sata/usb/fc) that will be/is the bottleneck for data here, far from it, its the device being read. usb 2.0 actually carries data roughly at the same speed as a 5400 rpm disk can operate.
3.0 is around current sata standard.
I think the best mem sticks, however expensive, are actually just on par with a normal 5400 or 7200 rpm hd.
But I agree, it will be crazy slow, but not because of the carrier, but because of the current usb flashdrive storage technology.Cheap ones read about 1/10th of a normal disk and write even slower.
But this should become better as SSD technology keeps pushing the limits anyway.
However I think Kat underestimates how amazingly unpractical just in physical shape/delivery of the usb-stick vs a cd/dvd. I agree that cd's are pretty 1990s tho. Digital download is teh shit.
Hm, I suppose you're right.
New plan: Digital Download that lets the user backup the data, properly, on a USB or similar media. No more "If the company goes down, they take my games with them". Might not be the easiest thing ever to prevent piracy while not blocking the user too much, though..
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