Sony: digital downloads for games is the future - Page 2

So in the future Gamestop might go out of business when there are no discs to trade in for pennies on the dollar for them to resale for $5 less than new? At least there is one plus to digital downloads.

Im not saying they shouldnt be. But the end result is... It's gonna cost us more to download these games Sony seems to think everybody wants to DL. TW is looking at packages with caps from 5 to 40gig. 5Gig right now is a joke. Heck I DL'ed 5G worth of demos in the past two weeks. Imagine if they'd have been full games.. 40gig would be pushing it with Game DL's and online gaming. I think Sony is really reaching here, as there are other factors that people have to (or are going to be forced) consider,when deciding on DL or going out to the store and buying it. They've all been mentioned here. DRM, Backup rights, multiple machines, Bandwidth requirements.. etc.

Hrm. Are you suggesting it's right for people to pay according to how much they use?

Interesting concept.

I want 25-50GB games that are fully fleshed out, not 5gb games("Blu-ray is important to games as well"). PS2 games used a DVD disc and now we're at a new generation of gaming, so how are we suppose to get a quality game like MGS4, RFOM 2, Uncharted, Killzone 2, etc. in such a small space?

Socom:Confrontation has few buildings, trees, cars, etc. in each of its levels. So far from the pictures, through my eyes, it has mediocre textures. The buildings look like boxes with few textures and off in the distance everything turns into a haze(a la Warhawk).
I'd rather have a full blown title with single player and the cool mic feature and has amazing graphics(possibly the unnamed Zipper title). Of course, Socom:Confrontation maybe fun, but I don't want these "small" games.

Note: I do have Stardust, HVB, and CaC. I am fine with those being downloadable, but not AAA games.

Sony loves this because they can cut out the resale market on disks. You can't resell a downloaded game.

I very often buy my games at half.com, then resell them there when I'm done. Sony makes absolutely no money off me and since I resell my games, I often get to play them at 1/3 of the cost new once resold.

I do want to say that I have 3 downloaded games though. Flow, Pixeljunk Monsters, and Gauntlet. Flow and Monsters were well worth the money, and are not games I would ever think to fork over money in a brick store. I play with my wife. I like how most of those mini games are all two player.

I love Steam. I love the way Valve does most things (except Day of Defeat Source, among very few others) but I have, do and will always prefer to have a hard copy. It's one thing to spend $5 on MKII or Rampage and not have anything tangible to show for it; it's quite another to get something like MGS4 or GTAIV for $60. At the prices we are paying for both games and consoles, gaming is a property investment. And if some corporations (and/or the government) think they can control what I do/don't do with my own property (within reason, of course) they can kiss my ass. I'll make as many copies of my **** as I want to, thank you very much, and if they don't like it they can **** off.

So first Sony wants game size to bloat for the Blu Ray pitch and now they want games to shrink to less than DVD sizes so they can be sold online as well... Selling special games online makes sense. Wanting to dual launch games in store and online does not. There's no way that the game in question would not degrade in the process.

Sony's confused it seems. Digital Distro is the way of the future there is no doubt. That future isn't as close as it seems though. I do feel Blu Ray will be the last real media though. I think both the PS4 and Xbox ??? will share that trait.

ROFL.


There's really no evidence that is because it is a downloadable game, though. Lots of disc-based games have mediocre textures.

Their last position made alot more sense: Both disc and online distribution have their place and each will be used where it made sense. The whole "disc distribution will fall" line is something I've never heard from them before, and to me it sounds insane (especially if they are talking about it happening during this console generation).

On a more practical level, I can see this happening on the PSP to some extent. Most handheld games are inherently smaller files than home console releases, plus there are advantages to having games on a memory stick, such as no UMDs to carry around and faster load time. The model in itself has already been well established by iTMS and other handheld services.

On the PS3, it's a whole different ballgame. The number of customers to be gained by download distribution is comparatively small; How many people here skipped out on GTA4 or MGS4 just because they had to go to the store to get it? There's not much to be gained by going completely online with this sort of product.

I can think of one major advantage for strong online distribution (strong = every game or almost every game available on the servers). Right now if I wanted a copy of Suikoden 2 I would have to pay some guy on eBay over $100 and Konami doesn't get a cent of that. There are a ton of great PSP and DS games out of print right now. If they were on online servers, I would be able to get those games at reasonable prices and the publishers/developers would get their cut of the money. It would cost them nothing to host these games but they could make money off them forever.

But they will never go "completely" online, as in its impossible to find a hard copy of a game. Never.

First of all, it was 640k. And second of all, no he didn't.

The trouble is that they aren't lowering prices for the people who use less. They are only raising prices for the people who use more. That's also not right.

The problem is that, if the telcomm companies have it their way, the only people who pay for what they use are the people that use more than their cap. Everybody else would still pay a flat rate and effectively subsidize the people going over the cap in the first place. Double taxation!

Brandon

Yeah clearly you've got different people steering the ship...the one part that says "we make 100% profit by going digital distribution!" versus the part that says "We make licensing fees on every BD disc we sell, AND we told everyone that all that space was needed to make next gen games!".

Whoops.

In the end there is no way to tell what the future holds. The ISP's are ALL going to throttle our bandwidth, no matter what....in fact they arleady do, and have been doing it...they're just going to make it "Official" now.

First they'll cap everyones monthly allowance and start sending out overcharge bills. Next, they'll REALLY start cracking down on torrents and downloaders to scare them off the networks. This will take alot of the pressure off them to have to fix or enhance their existing networks. It also scares off people from NETFLIX and AppleTV and gets them looking back at ON-DEMAND (which is almost criminal).

In the end, they WANT you paying $40 bucks a month to check email, check your bank account, and surf for a little porn. And nothing else. And this applies to FIOS too, that unlimited spree wont last either.

Sony can't push 20gb downloads.....but Sony can push 5gb downloads. But then what about BD? Is that reserved for only the biggest of games? And if you grab a 5gb game, will you wish there was a 20gb version with even more tracks/levels/whatever? Or is this an example that BD is only really useful for HD video and lossless, uncompressed sound.....which there is no way you're getting on a digital download.

?????

Interesting reading nontheless.....be curious to see where they go with it.

Except, nobody is saying that digital distribution is going to be 100% of the business. I don't know where you guys are reading this.

Yes, the guy in the OP says eventually disc based distribution will "fall". Don't most people, you know, agree with this? You guys sound like he said "next year everything will be DD" or something.

As for ISPs... eh Im not seeing it. When my family got our first computer Prodigy and AOL was limited to X number of hours per month. Eventually that business model was thrown out as customers demanded unlimited hours. ISPs can try to throttle all they want, and they will (former Cablevision customer here), and its a normal reaction from the fat lazy dinosaurs that these telcos are, but they will have to realize that our world is not one of limited bandwidth. Netflix, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, etc. are big companies and have driven a lot of broadband business to the telcos - putting extreme caps on bandwidth would piss off those big companies as well as customers.

Do telcos have a right to be angry that some people are sucking up all their bandwidth to download illegal games and movies? Of course, and they have a right to try to stop that IMO. It's just a tricky legal question.

*sigh*

The point isn't necessarily that its one or the other, but that Sony is now talking out of both corners of its mouth, I believe thats what all this discussion is about.


I do not believe that this is the end of disc based distribution until the infrastructure is there to support non-disc based solutions. Its not there.

It wont be there for some time to come.

But Sony does have other options.....for example, keeping their game code on secure servers with major retailers. Go into store, have game burned on demand to a disc or onto a portable HD, take home..install and play, something like that. Its another possible option, was tried with music in the past but then it was too "new"...didn't catch on. Now, its a different world.


You are in for quite the wake-up call then. And I don't mean that to be pushing your buttons, I mean that because the Telco's have majorly underdeveloped their networks. Fact is, if more people start streaming or downloading higher quality files (legal, forget illegal), the networks can't handle the bandwidth. Quality of Serivce goes down, people get frustrated.

And this isn't about buying a better tier of service, or buying a business account versus a home account, this is about "we dont have the capacity".

Why? Well they want to shove 100 more HD channels down our throats (Pay Per View of course!)...and that takes bandwidth. Thats also why your SD on cable is atrocitous..VH1 Classics for me is in a near state of permanant macroblocking Guess they figure everyone watching it is old enough and has bad enough eyes we wont notice!

The cable companies have gone on the record that $40 a month isn't nearly enough to pay for the upgraded services we are all going to require of them to feed the next generation of broadband-required applications.


Except that this arguement isn't about illegal downloaders, its about legal downloads. Its about companies who offer services that depend on bandwidth, image hosting services, data hosting services, video hosting services. Its about next-gen business models......what if Netflix wants to offer 100% streaming services? Blockbuster? What if online shopping means now we all get full 3D FLI movies of every product and video reviews on everything...? All pictures are high rez and high quality..... Teleconferencing? Video Conferencing? Video Phone Calls?

Streaming TV...Streaming Audio....the list goes on and on.And you Absolutely cannot ignore the fact that alot of this legal downloading of movies and tv shows is in *direct competition* with the cable companies or telcos own On-Demand type services.....hmmmm..conflict of interest? Perhaps...

All of that eats up bandwidth, but *ALL* of that is proposed for the next gen business models....we aren't all going to be looking at 23k JPEGs forever on shopping sites.

If I take 1 hour of home movies and send that file digitally to a relative via the internet, that one file is nearly 13gigs in size. That is roughly half my monthly bandwidth allotment on Time Warners proposed *HIGHEST* tier right now, in one transfer!

There's a problem here, alright...and just telling the telcos to suck it up wont change it, I'm afraid. We all knew this day was coming.....Comcast has been quitetly kicking off big bandwidth users...they TRIED to get away with crippling **********....TimeWarner is killing their usenet servers and going to a max 40gig per month, Cox ALREADY has a 40gig per month cap....

Pretty soon it'll be hourly too "40gigs a month, and 40 hours online!"

No, what they are saying is, "digital distribution is important, and PS3 is on the forefront of it". I don't see how this is two-faced or duplicitious in any way.


I don't doubt this, and like I said earlier I think a major reason is regulations in this country tilted towards protecting the huge companies with zones of non-competition, unlike regulators in countries like France or South Korea. Here's an article. I do believe that can change, though it will take the help of politicians in Washington and we all know how that goes...

Quoted:
"We do believe that the disc-based delivery system will fall as the power of the network base rises. "

I don't know how you read that, but to me it reads "BD is unnecessary"

OR it could also be read as this: "I'm a retarded VP in charge of some finance area and have no idea that GT5P was as small as a DVD-R movie, and no clue that there's no way we can distribute large games that woud require a BD disc in a digital download format, when our smallest supported PS3 console has a 20gb hard drive".

Take your pick.


True nuff....but it still leaves us with short term problems. Digital Distribution is great, but its got a few things working against it.

1) ISP's dont want you clogging their networks getting media they'd much rather have you BUYING from THEM directly.

2) ISP's dont have adequate infrastructre to support even todays growing high-bandwidth demands. I live in the 'burbs...I feel sorry for the poor bastards getting 1mbps downloads in some city apartment.

3) There is comfort in the ownership of physical media.....when you buy a song for 99 cents its almost an intangible object at an insignificant price. But when you buy a game for Sixty Dollars....well for that kind of money, you want to hold something in your hand, you want the disc, or at the very least you want to know that the game is yours..and you can download it again and again to infinity if you had to because your drive failed, or your copy was corrupted.....and we need bandwith and companies that linger for that to happen. Hell most of my EA games for the xbox which are still great fun to play and just being discovered by some gamers in used stores, dont even work online anymore as EA or their parent companies have shut down the servers to host those games.....thats a little scary, and annoying.

I am not seeing that at all. In fact I see what he is saying as basic facts. And even if I did hear him just say "BD is unnecessary", I would actually rather they admit the reality of the situation than bury their hands in the sand like their counterparts at Sony Music did for half a decade.

BD is IMO very much necessary for gaming today. 360 DVDs are too small and are holding back a lot of games. So I'll take BD now but just as I knew CDs were on their way out as storage mediums when DVD hit the scene, I know they won't be relevant forever.

As for your second comment, he never mentioned, not even for a second, that gigantic 20+ gig games would be distributed over PSN in the near future. That is pure projection on your part. I highly doubt they are going to be looking to do that with the PS3.

I think back to 10 years ago, I had 56K downloading tiny files to my 1.6 gig hard drive. Later that year we upgraded to (really bad and unreliable) DSL with a 10 gig hard drive. The thought of downloading a full game, like I did for Orange Box without a second thought, never even crossed my mind into the realm of possibility. Is it inconceivable that 10 years from now it will be trivial to download a 40-50gig game like MGS4 to your enormous hard drive? It shouldn't be.

The big problem is that most every ISP has badly oversold capacity. The usage patterns of their customers have changed greatly in the last few years. People that used to just check their email and read text based websites now use multiples of the bandwidth they used to streaming video from youtube, netflix and other sources. More people then ever are online gaming using this generation of consoles. Vonage and other companies stream telephone service. Embedded video popping up on most every webpage. I-tunes. Slingbox. Internet radio... the list goes on and on. The average user uses tremendously more resources then they did 5 years ago and capacity has not even begun to keep up.

Until capacity catches up, either the customers are going to have to live with caps, or these companies that want to sell you downloads are going to have to give ISPs a cut of the profits. I can definitely see deals made in the future where purchases from certain companies will not count against your cap.

Thats the problem in a nut shell. BUt more specifically the Infrastructure problem is the last mile to the customer. Copper aint gonna cut it. And running fiber cost around $70,000 per mile in the sticks, and $150,000 and up in urban areas.
Those numbers add up to the BILLIONS of dollars real quick when you talk about upgraded the infrastructure to fiber. On the other side back and the Central Offices of the Telco's and Cable Co's they have insane bandwidth between fiber and microwave and sattelite.


And again.. all the regulations, and politicians in DC wont produce the capital needed to upgrade the infrastructure of the last mile. This last mile were customers are bottle necked onto the same piece of cooper is the problem. Replacing that cooper is very costly. And until the last 2 or 3 years the demand for high speed services just could not DID NOT justify the risk to the providers. You see Verizon has recognized the demand and are the first to market Fios. Other companies are already following suit....WITHOUT governmen regulations. If you really want to screw something up. Allow our Government to get it's hands into it.

ndskyz, no offense but you really don't understand what "regulations" mean in this context. People in this country have this nutty idea that regulation means the government steps in and orders companies what to do and makes them pay for it and its always (ALWAYS!) bad. Well, sometimes, but not always. It depends on who is doing the regulating, really. Good regulations can open up markets and competition.

Here is an article with more detail: http://www.businessweek.com/globalbi...718_387052.htm. Page 2 of the article gets into more detail about what should be done vs. what has been done here.

None taken.I know what regulations you are talking about.. but Like I said. I've been in telco for over 15years. I've seen what our Government does when it steps in and does what is best for the customer. The FCC (and our Government for that fact) are too corupt with corperate dollars. The same thing that France did with FTE is the same thing the FCC did way back in 96. When they forced AT&T to spin off the bells ( I know I worked for AT&T back in 97) and told the bells they could go after AT&T's long distance customers and AT&T could go after the Bells local land line customers.. How did that work out for consumers here in the States? Oh wait 15 years later we are right back were we started with AT&T/SBC being damned near the same power house they were back in the 90's And the funny thing is.. The FCC ALLOWED AT&T to buy all the Bells back up, in a round about way. by allwoing AT&T to buy the companies that bought the bells Ameritech. SBC...etc. How the heck can they (FCC) push competition on one hand and then allow a company to build up a nationwide Monopoly.....again!
Edit: Oh and I forgot.. AT&T used to own Comcast too. yet another thing the FCC allowed.

I think its nice to have, but not necessary. And on that note, we smile and accept that the other one is crazy to think the way they do


Stop talking in absolutes, he made vague comments and we're making vague hypothesis' about his vague comments...its why Forums exist

If he's talking about small games being distributed on PSN, like arcade titles...well their competetors (both of em) already do that. And Sony isn't on the forefront, they're the last to the party.

If he's talking about the larger games, Warhawk and GT5P...then he is directly or indirectly (depending on how you want to see it) invalidating the "BD's are requred for next gen gaming" statement that Sony has stood by.

Now before we debate this further, lets look at this from another point of view: You are a Developer. You've made a game.

Sony has stated prices have to be the same for D/L and BD content. So now...do you make your game huge, and force people to buy the BD copy, or do you make your game smaller, and make it available for download....because you may get people who buy the game on a whim that would ordinarily not buy the game on disc. (I almost bought GT5P in a semi-inebriated state one night as an impulse buy).

So does that mean gamers are indirectly getting, well, gipped?

Gipped in the same way you say 360 and Wii users are by having to have their games "fit on DVD's"...?? And if you say no, then how can you say Gamers are getting screwed by having to deal with "only dvd's" on 360 or Wii games?

I'm not trying to back you into a corner here, for real, its just that this is how Sony's talking out of both sides.....they're like great politicians right now...walking the middle ground, argreeing to both sides of the arguement depending on whos point of view they are taking..."Discs are dead...but discs are required to have great HD content only available on PS3!" etc, etc.


Course not......but based on recent developments, Probability is starting to go down.

I'm really not sure how Sony decides whether to put games on PSN. But only a couple have come out and I know of only one more in the future. In the theoretical you state, yes it makes sense to tailor your game for DD too. But how many games have that choice? Right now its looking like 1 or 2 a year, at most, all first party games. Two of the three are multiplayer, network focused so it even makes sense to allow for DD.

By the time every game is on both DD and store shelves, the network will have to be able to accomodate Blu-Ray sized titles. But that won't be for a while. I sincerely doubt the trend towards larger and larger games is going to cease, even with network downloading becoming more prominent.


FWIW, I believe this can be traced to the fact that before we had an administration that was fairly pragmatic and focused on good policy through firm examinations of facts by experts in the field, to an administration focused on ruthlessly gutting government and placing pro-industry hacks and incompetent cronies in positions of power.

Just as long as they update it to get rid of the download then install feature PSN currently has.

Everyone seems to have forgotten. The U.S.A., Europe, and Asia are not the whole world!!!!!! True right now with the ps3's price it may only be selling in those regions. Later on when it starts getting cheaper people all over the world will jump on board. Even for the NEXT GEN in what 5 years the internet will not be ready. The internet is just gonna be playing catchup. Think about it. If we have 50gb 720p games nowadays, imagine the next gen when we have 1080p or higher games with 7.1 standard. huh? Think about it.

It's already trivial to download a 40-50 GB game. Eleven years ago I had 5mbs down/1 mbs up service. I currently have 30/5 with FIOS and next week I'll have 50/20. No caps with FIOS. I'd much rather download a game(as long as it's a litlte cheaper) than pay extra for a disc and packaging. The disc only takes up unneeded space.