Frenetic Pony

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There are tons of people who are able to connect their consoles to the internet, but simply don't have the kind of bandwidth that is needed to download a movie or a game. And games are growing, possibly/probably/maybe faster than broadband is.

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Yeah I think the whole no-disc thing is a silly tangent. It will eventually happen, but certainly not in a year.

I'm not surprised MS went with Blu-Ray. Maybe it's with reluctance but it would have been crazy to ship a system in 2013-14 with anything but a Blu-Ray player or close.

Regardless I don't think MS is currently losing a ton of business due to lacking the PS3's Blu-Ray player. Aren't their 360 sales way stronger than the PS3's right now, thanks in no small part to the fact that they're able to undercut them because it's way cheaper to make a 360 than a PS3?

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Yeah, I think people are downplaying the importance of retail to the sales of a new console. Download-only would directly sabotage retail relationships in pretty significant ways, not to mention the admittedly minority yet important group of people who don't connect their consoles to the internet. I'm fairly convinced that this is why Games on Demand and Sony's full-game download service has practically never been competitive on price with retailers - if you don't make price and convenience a trade-off, retail is essentially worthless. Hence, why the retail PC game section is so insignificant in most game shops.

I don't know what it's like in the US, but here in the UK, I don't believe there's any major highstreet game retailers left. Game went into administration last year, and HMV are just about gone. Is there anyone else?

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Regardless I don't think MS is currently losing a ton of business due to lacking the PS3's Blu-Ray player. Aren't their 360 sales way stronger than the PS3's right now, thanks in no small part to the fact that they're able to undercut them because it's way cheaper to make a 360 than a PS3?

Nope. The PS3 outsold the 360 in 2012.

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There are tons of people who are able to connect their consoles to the internet, but simply don't have the kind of bandwidth that is needed to download a movie or a game. And games are growing, possibly/probably/maybe faster than broadband is.

Yeah, I guess that's true. I'm sure MS are pretty unhappy that Games on Demand hasn't taken off, though.

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But I still don't know if I buy the argument that if the Xbox had had an external Blu-Ray drive available these numbers would be any different.

Well, they would be different, because *I* wouldn't have bought a PS3 if there was an external 360 BD drive! :)

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Really? Huh. I bought mine because I wanted to play Journey and Ni No Kuni. (And the Uncharteds and God of Wars). The Blu-Ray player was totally just a bonus thing. I've used a gift card to buy Blade Runner and the Alien Trilogy and I think that's about where my collection is going to end.

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Yeah, I guess that's true. I'm sure MS are pretty unhappy that Games on Demand hasn't taken off, though.

Because they're dashboard is awful, there's no advertising for it, and I have a damned 20 gig HDD that can barely fit Borderlands 2 and the DLC, let alone other games!

It happened with the PC, most PC's don't even have optical drives anymore. Tablets and smartphones never have. The only thing holding back digital on consoles is tradition really, and used games of course. But Gamestop is going downhill constantly, did Game do something similar in the UK?

I know it can SEEM like the right thing. Like oh, discs will be around for a good while yet. That's the way any industry paradigm seems. And then suddenly you're RIM and losing sales every year while Apple becomes the largest traded company in history. Or you're MySpace or Friendster, or etc. Technology today can crush the unwary in a handful of years if you're not right on top of it. Oh I don't doubt that adding discs to the PS4 and Durango is fine. I just doubt it'll last that long, retail's concerns or not. They get a profit from selling the console itself anyway.

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You can say anything using that argument. Consoles will go the way of Napster. Or PCs will go the way of Amiga. Right now, the post will deliver to places that may never have broadband internet because so few people live there.

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At this point if consoles went download-only that'd pretty much end my gaming hobby right there. Despite being literally right in the middle of a major UK city in 2013, my connectivity is barely adequate to cover even game patches in a timely fashion — and I'm far from an uncommon story.

On Saturday I really wanted to play BioShock. Then I realised I could have literally gotten it from the shop after work on Monday and STILL been playing it faster than if I'd tried to get it off Xbox LIVE. Absolute gash, mon.

So yeah, while shitty broadband and relatively harsh caps exist in at least this country — the most amusing being Virgin who give you 60mb/s fibre but cut your speed right down if you download more than a few GB in the evening — we aren't going to be downloading 50GB Blu-ray games any time soon.

Concerning the whole retail thing: game-only vendors are going down the toilet, but that's more because other retailers like supermarkets, department stores, and electronics shops are selling the same games and often for cheaper. If people really want a wider, older catalogue there'll always be little second-hand shops like CeX. Rumours of brick-and-mortar game outlets disappearing are greatly exaggerated, genuinely sad as it is (my local GAME that I frequented as a child with my dad was gutting).

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Just because you need "retail" doesn't mean you need "GameStop." I'm sure Wal-Mart, Target and Amazon will be happy to sell the consoles that GameStop isn't, and they likely won't care about whether they get the games or not. (And Amazon has been trying really hard to be another place where you can buy digital things for your things, so it's not like they have a dog in this fight.)

That said, I do think that especially for kids and family games, there is a value to be had in being able to go to the store and pick out the game you want, take it home, put it in the box and play it. Most gamers may not need this, but there is definitely a chunk of the market who will not (for now) go into that newfangled "Store" menu.

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It's not going to go that fast, and a big part of the reason is indeed established retail. The consoles still need the shops to sell, and those shops will refuse to sell consoles if there isn't also a truckload of physical games to make money off of. Don't underestimate the power of stores. Not stocking new product can be a death knell. You and me will still get the goods online, but the average person, i.e. where the money is, will not.

This is the reason why Nintendo is taking such care to offer its downloadable full games for a. full retail price, so as not to anger shops, and b. also provide physical boxes with a gift card in them, to sell in stores.

Another reason is visibility. Digital products have much less visibility than a real product in the real world. Again, not a problem for Steam users like us, but how many 'casual' people do you know with Steam?

Look, I'd rather not have all that either, apart from the pleasures of second hand, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. For now.

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To be clear, I'm not saying discs will disappear over night. I'm just saying they'll be gone soon enough. I had a shared 1.5 mbit connection for years, and still bought games digitally. And yes, there are caps because telecoms in most every country are unchallenged monopolies that charge you because they can. Yes, some people will whine and complain about not having a physical disc. That's not stopped the utter disappearance of PC retail.

And there's really no water held with "retail will demand it". Demand what, and how? "We refuse to carry your product, multi billion dollar international technology company, because people are choosing to buy a related product in a different way!" Really? Of course not, Walmart is a pressure loving scumbag company, but they don't have enough muscle to DEMAND that what? Microsoft make it's digital delivery less convenient so they can retain their market share of video games?

Hell, retail game sales have been going down for years anyway. Walmart will just have to accept it like anyone else. Just like they did with other software retail. Because, like they have with PC games, and every other software product in existence, people will choose to buy digital because it's more convenient. If it's not more convenient for YOU specifically, then that's one reason why it's not happened already. Not a reason why it won't happen.

And the paradigm mention was because people, everyone, tends to believe in paradigms. Humans as a whole tend to think trends will continue, it's just how our brains work. I'm simply saying, don't fall into that trap. Don't assume that because something is a trend, it's automatically going to continue.

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I feel it's worth pointing out that many retail chains refused to sell the PSP Go because of its digital only nature.

Which, admittedly, is kind of ridiculous when you consider that many of those same stores now sell tablets and smart phones.

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The whole bandwidth argument makes me think that discs disappearing "soon enough" is also unlikely. Even with good bandwidth, it still takes a hell of a long time to download 10 or 15GB especially at peak hours when all your neighbours are watching their 720p Netflix streams and clogging up the pipe. That's why you're seeing 4K movies being distributed on dual-layer blu-rays and hard drives - even if Sony or LG wanted to send you 25+ GB movie files over the web, 8K televisions would swoop in before you even downloaded your first 4K copy of Casablanca.

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The whole bandwidth argument makes me think that discs disappearing "soon enough" is also unlikely. Even with good bandwidth, it still takes a hell of a long time to download 10 or 15GB especially at peak hours when all your neighbours are watching their 720p Netflix streams and clogging up the pipe. That's why you're seeing 4K movies being distributed on dual-layer blu-rays and hard drives - even if Sony or LG wanted to send you 25+ GB movie files over the web, 8K televisions would swoop in before you even downloaded your first 4K copy of Casablanca.

Yeah, it seems like the size of our media will continue outpacing the bandwidth of our networks for quite some time to come. We've gone from having most games be less than 1GB to having tons of 10GB+ games in under a decade, and bandwidth has definitely not kept pace. I don't imagine that increase in game size is going to stop any time soon, either.

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Re: download only games. Yeah, game size is outpacing bandwidth AND hard disk capacities by quite a margin. Manufacturing optical discs is *always* going to be cheaper, so I don't see discs going away soon. And when they do, they'll be superseded by streaming/cloud technology, not full downloads.

Re: Blu-ray. The "MS couldn't swallow their pride" argument doesn't make sense when you consider that their decision making revolves around...

? To make money. That's the usual reason for selling things!

The only logical explanation is that making a BD add-on was not commercially practical. I imagine that: 1) the licensing fees, 2) the long standing difficulty of selling add-ons at retail, and 3) the declining price of Blu-ray players*, factored into the decision. And of course, building it into the Xbox itself would run against their goal of lowering the price and increasing margins on the Xbox.

* not to say they were cheap at the time, but the trend was there.

Did Microsoft lose sales? Definitely. It couldn't have been significant though, because if the cost-benefit analysis worked in their favour, they'd have introduced a Blu-ray add-on, pride be damned!

So why introduce it in Durango? Microsoft need to build the most powerful, future-proof platform they can. Part of that is high capacity discs. Price and margins are a lower priority.

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Actually, thinking about this a little more: it's likely that the HD-DVD add-on was never very profitable for Microsoft, but the benefit of control made it worth selling. Control is a very valuable form of currency. With Blu-ray, it wouldn't be profitable *and* they didn't have the chance to gain more control either. Lose, lose.

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I don't think anyone can not see that digital distribution will ultimately reign supreme, but right now connectivity is so universally shit it's just not going to happen, and I honestly think it'll be the next next generation (ie: 10 years) before if does. Digital distribution has been a thing for the last 10 years since Steam debuted and we're still in a pretty shit position internet-wise.

Even with the current generation it's a tall order to expect people to download 4–6GB games. It takes fucking ages for many people. But the 30–100GB games the next generation could bring? Piss right off. It'd be quicker to do what many people are already doing (and this is a large part of where your PC retail is going by the way): order online, have it delivered within a day or so. Still faster than it'd take to download even a current-gen game and it's patches on a shitty line.

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Actually, thinking about this a little more: it's likely that the HD-DVD add-on was never very profitable for Microsoft, but the benefit of control made it worth selling. Control is a very valuable form of currency. With Blu-ray, it wouldn't be profitable *and* they didn't have the chance to gain more control either. Lose, lose.

Except for the sales they lost to Sony. And the fact that the HD-DVD add-on sold relatively well. And the fact that they'd only need to sell the actual drive, since everyone already owned the processing power in their 360s. (It only had to be significantly cheaper than a PS3.) So aside from all that...

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It'd be interesting to see some kind of data regarding how much of an impact Blu-ray actually made on PS3 sales, although I can't imagine how it'd be gathered. I personally have always been guided first and foremost by the specific games I want to play when buying consoles, and so as people above said the Blu-ray was a bonus for me — I'd have just bought the cheapest standalone player possible otherwise.

I'm leaning towards it not actually being that big a factor for a lot of people, indeed most people I know couldn't have cared less and just went with the 360 anyway, and those that did get a PS3 did so for other reasons. I'm sure it had some effect, but not anything particularly huge. If there were ginormous gains to be had from releasing a Blu-ray player for the 360 I'm fairly certain Microsoft would have done it.

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Define "sold relatively well" - according to this 2007 year-end NPD wrap-up, attach rate was 3.5% to hardware sales or a total of 316K units with respect to 9.15M Xbox 360s sold in the United States as of December 2007. Considering the add-on was discontinued in February 2008, I think that's essentially the most useful number we're going to get as far as its retail performance goes.

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