Nintendo switch > ps4 and Xbox one because of discs

A disc drive should not be part of a console but a peripheral if anything

Correct. ✔️

@pdogg93: Lmao, most of its “kiddie games” are just as if not more mature than “m rated” games that hold your hand.

Delusional level statement even I cant reach

@sakaixx: almost all games have tutorials that treat you like you are a kid...

lol

Meh. Discs, cartridges - both obsolete analogue media in a digital world. There's a reason it looks like PS5 and Xbox Series X will probably have Blu-ray drives and won't adopt, say, the HVD. 70% of all console game sales are already digital, and is set to rise even further.

If Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have any balls, they'll ditch physical media altogether and go all-digital.

@madrocketeer: MS tried the no disc drive this gen, tell me exactly how their all digital console worked out again?

@tomalevine: WTF are you talking about?

More analog thinking. It's not like markets change over time or anything, right? Oh, that shift from physical to digital over the last 10 years didn't happen. Oh, that trend is going to somehow magically stop dead in its track in 2020 or something.

Fact is, physical media's days are numbered. The sooner people get over their attachment to little bits of plastic, the better.

HVD... Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time. I wonder if the cost for that format has fallen to a acceptable price as I recall the cost for 1 HVD is around $200. Regardless, Blu Ray has Sony and Disney alongside other movie studios in bed together. That dominance will ensure Blu Ray continues to be the leading format for entertainment.

Can you show me a link that says 70% of all console games sold are digital?

Digital only is fucking stupid, as you can only get a discount on games when MS/Sony say so, can't shop around for a better deal, can't price match. Only lazy people care about digital and throwing their money away.

An alt with stupid opinions, nice to see you guys keeping up a SW tradition :)

@tomalevine: chances are next generation consoles won't have them at all.

Probably not, due to obvious lack of market penetration. History says that when it comes to hardware manufacturing, scale = efficiency = lower prices. No scale means no price reduction.

Blu-ray continues to be the dominant physical media becaue there is little market impetus to move to a new physical media format. It still handles compressed 4K video okay, which has iffy market penetration anyway. And even if they were to move to a new format, all indications are it will be to streaming, which was predicted all the way back when Blu-ray was launched.

Well, I'm going to admit that I was bit strident with the claim. I saw the figure on some article a few months back and just ran with it.

However, upon closer inspection, the real figures seem to be far more complicated. I found two figures that show 80% of all game sales in UK and US are now digital, but that's PC, console and everything else. I found another that forecasted that 53% of console game sales in the US will be digital by 2019. However, elsewhere physical are still dominant, such as in Spain. I also found another set of figures that showed globally, physical sales still account for about 60% of all console game sales in 2019, with digital sales accounting for about 30% and rising rapidly. It's a lot of articles to link to, so I'll just let you search for them yourself.

But that's beside the point; I was wrong, and that's my mistake. I will be sure to not be so strident in the future, and all-digital consoles do not make commercial sense... ...yet.

That has more to do with the closed nature of the console platforms. On PC, which is an open platform, bargain hunting is very much alive and well, as can be seen from reseller sites like Green Man Gaming, Humble and G2A. A little more openness in the console space could solve this issue.

I should warn you, though, that you are in the minority on this. The retail versus digital price discrepancy did not stop Steam from rising to become the dominant storefront for PC game sales - physical or digital. Most of a game's sales are accumulated around the launch period, when most consumers already expect to be paying full price, and are prepared to pay a premium for convenience. The pricing discrepancy did not stop Steam, so it won't stop Microsoft or Sony either.

@madrocketeer: Bwahahaha, how many times have we heard this, "derp derp physical media is dead derp derp", yet I can still buy cds which were supposed to be dead 10 + years ago lol. You and your digital thinking, derp derp derp.

Well if you lump PC sales in with consoles games sales of course the digital percentage will by high as that's the only way to get PC games these days, so those figures are worthless. So what you've found is that digital isn't as massive as you believe.

Yeah people will pay a premium for digital games because gamers are lazy like i said.

Here physical is at least 20% cheaper than digital, there is no excuse for that and that's just one of the reasons why a digital only on console won't work as well, because it will neuter competition and competition keeps prices lower.

@vfighter:

Individual anecdotes do not refute statistical trend. Today's CD sales in the US is less than 6% of what it was in 2000. In 2015, less than a quarter of all music sales in the US was on physical media.

It took a while for floppy disks to fade into irrelevance too. You can still buy USB floppy drives to this day, but no sane person would ever claim they are commercially relevant. The CD is following a similar trend.

But hey, maybe something magic will suddenly happen and stop these market trends from happening further, right? Any day now...

Physical media isn't obsolete at all. Some PC gamers just like to tell everybody that because they have no choice. Their platform never even upgraded beyond shitty 8.5 GB DVDs. I mean, you can buy a Blu-ray drive, but Blu-ray had so little market penetration that no developer ever printed their game on BD. Physical media helps keep big companies in check. I dread a world where they own your copy completely and can do whatever they want with it.

Also means I don't have to waste bandwidth downloading the same game again. I have a 1 TB a month cap, like most Comcast subscribers, and these games are getting bigger and bigger. If I streamed as many movies as I watch each month (at least one a day, plus TV shows), I would have gone over my 1 TB already, and the streams would have looked and sounded worse.

@i_p_daily:

Well, yeah, that's pretty much what I implied from the figures I found. However, the figures also show a rapid transition towards digital even in the console space. The market is changing, that is for certain.

Lazy or not, that is the reality. Calling people lazy will not stop the shift to digital. Neutering the competition is precisely the point. Sony and Microsoft are not in the position to do that just yet, but the price discrepancy alone will not be enough to stop them. The experience with Steam proved this.

While I certainly appreciate what discs have contributed to gaming over the years I do prefer cartridges myself. Now that they have grown in capacity and shrunk in size I would love to see them come back as the norm for gaming format.

Physical for life baby!

Cartridges aren't obsolete, where you get that from. You do know the Switch cartridge is totally different tech from a NES cartridge right?

@Bond007uk: Hmm is that why switch and vita games have load times?

Either way carts don’t have the same problem discs have

@tomalevine: Yes. Switch carts are just read only flash memory, they need to load into RAM.

Atari VCS, NES, SNES, Genesis used read only EPROM's. Basically when plugged in they connected directly to the main board and become readable by the CPU as i if it was RAM. Hence no load times.

@Bond007uk: Go back and replay those older systems and games, they have load times.

I've already seen some digital only games disappear from online stores. I don't want to see anymore disappear, thanks.

Switch carts a a pain to deal with.

..but yeah better than discs which are loud and slow.

Yeah I was sad when GameStop stopped selling SNES and PS1 games too. Shit happens. I still prefer digital nowadays.

Physical media in general is a pain, even though I much prefer buying physical for consoles. It's kind of a lose-lose in this situation.

@pyro1245: How are disc loud? The level of stupid comments in this thread is reaching maximum levels...

You kidding? Did you mean for your comment to be the max stupid?

You realize that disk drives make a noise, right? Are you okay?

How could one even possibly entertain this standpoint

@lundy86_4: So do hard drives and any other moving parts, but the noise level from a disc drive isn't even noticeable. Jesus Christ I can't believe I actually have to explain this...

Explain that all systems with moving parts make noise? No, you don't. I suppose it would depend on what @pyro1245 determines as loud. There seems to be a disconnect. Furthermore, there are forum posts of noises from 4K BR drives when playing a movie. Simple Google search.

Can you explain to me how much noise a disc drive makes when you play a digital game?

@pyro1245: Enough that I can't even enjoy digital games.

So you can't enjoy a game because it's being played without a disk?

A game card just doesn't hold as much space a blu-ray disc.

Paying full price for WiiU ports and atrocious current gen ports is not why i play video games. The Switch offers nothing.

@madrocketeer:

For physical games there will always be an enthusiast market. Heck music studios even started producing new VINYL RECORDS again because there was an enthusiast market for it.

It's going to be the same for video games. Playing a game on the original cart on original hardware will be a different experience than just buying it off a digital store, and the game being emulated to play on different hardware.

There's even people doing this with PC games; going back and building PC riggs from the 90's and early 2000's to play older PC games BECAUSE that's how the games were meant to be played; and for them to get the real experience of that game they need the intended hardware for that game to run on (The biggest thing being Sound cards from that era of PC gaming)

There is a bit of a difference between vinyl records and game discs....

Vinyl records are purely analog. They are a physical representation of a waveform. Compared to digital audio which are digital approximations of those waveforms and will always be imperfect no matter how high the resolution and bitrate. So there is a valid argument for continuing to produce records or hi-fi tapes.

Game data is always digital. Regardless of where and how you get it the data is exactly the same. If it's not your game won't work.

I do agree there will be use cases for physical media as a way of distributing data. I also think collectors editions are a great way to allow people who prefer this to get their data. However, I think disc-based media is obsolete and needs to go. Something like NAND flash memory is a much better solution. It's faster, the readers don't take up any extra space, and there are no moving parts so there is less risk of failure. Not to mention devices can be smaller and cheaper by omitting the disc drive.

@vfighter: I have, still no load times. Sure on a number of games there is blank screen between levels, but these last a second or two. There's no screen that says 'loading', nothing on the scale of the PSONE.

Regardless, it's still totally different tech.

Agreed. Since physical media is mostly just a means to install on to hardware, discs are faster and more reliable in that sense. Problem with that is size and cost, but they are almost on par with discs and the gap is narrowing by the day.

But guess what? You can find any of those SNES and PS1 games in mom and pop shops and eBay. If a digital only game disappears, and you never had the chance to play it, that's it. In some cases, digital only games can't even be redownloaded after it's taken off the store, so if your harddrive crashes and you lose that game, that's it.

@JustPlainLucas: Eh it's not a big deal. You're talking about a very small percentage of games. There are plenty of rare games you probably won't be able to find a physical version of.

Truth is, people on the internet are way better at preserving gaming history than the main players in the industry will ever be.

Digital game can disappear, and they can come back. Physical games usually don't go back into print. And can you even name a game that you currently want to play that you can't buy digitally without searching the internet? (and don't say PT, it's a demo)

The Konami arcade games, for one. The Simpsons, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, X-Men. I had TMNT on Xbox 360 and X-Men on PS3, and last I checked, you couldn't redownload them. I lost both my Xbox 360 and PS3 harddrives, so those games were lost, and I never got around to buying The Simpsons before it was too late.

Yeah, I get it's a very small percentage, but even one game is a loss. Digital only also excludes people who don't have reliable internet because of geographic locations, people who have data caps, and believe it or not, people who don't have internet at all. I'm aware of the advantages of digital games, but I don't think losing the advantages of physical games (like just handing over a game to a friend) is worth going digital only. Physical and digital should always co-exist.

@JustPlainLucas: Hey that Simpsons game looks cool I might check it out ;)

I'm joking, I'm joking....... I'm not really trying to play it.

You're right about one thing: Everyone gets to decide for themselves how they feel about our digital future. Personally I'll take the convenience of digital over physical.

I do agree with that