Ooooookay, it's REALLY time for PC games to go Blu Ray now....

Don't the physical copies of PC games lack manuals or cool booklets anyways these days? Also I'm over displaying game boxes, they just take up too much space now.
 
We're forgetting that OP mentioned bandwidth caps. Due to that, it makes sense that he would want a physical disc. Even though it likely has to have a patch applied to it at some point in its life, at least the game media doesn't need to be downloaded...
 
jbltecnicspro said:
We're forgetting that OP mentioned bandwidth caps. Due to that, it makes sense that he would want a physical disc. Even though it likely has to have a patch applied to it at some point in its life, at least the game media doesn't need to be downloaded...
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I mentioned that in my post. But it's also pertinent to remember that some physical games don't even have the installation media on them. IIRC, neither Skyrim nor Mafia 2 had the content on the disc.
 
Arct1c0n said:
This guy gets it...
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I beg to differ. Owning the physical media means jack shit these days. Most of the time, you will still need to register the product on Steam or any other service. So you're still bound to the same DRM bullshit that the downloaders have to put up with.

Case in point, I checked out one of those old WMVHD discs from our library last year. As a teenager, I was always curious to see some of those IMAX films on WMVHD. Anyways, I popped the disc in my drive, only to find that Microsoft had shut down the DRM servers. So guess what? Damn disc didn't work - at all. It needed to activate, and the server that could do it is history.
 
It would actually be cheaper for the game developers to create a custom USB 3.0 flash drive to use for their games instead of disks...Many PC's don't even come with a CD/DVD/BluRay anymore...Think of the speed difference too. For that matter no install needed you could just play them off the flash drive and then everyone would have an SSD. Even with the USB 3.0 it still has to be faster than hard disk drives or BluRay drives.
 
SRTie4k said:
I mentioned that in my post. But it's also pertinent to remember that some physical games don't even have the installation media on them. IIRC, neither Skyrim nor Mafia 2 had the content on the disc.
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I'm pretty sure Skyrim did have the content on the disc. It's version 1.2 (at least mine was), so upon installing it, you need to download the latest patches anyways.
 
The only physical disks I have for my PC are my Windows disk (only because I burned the ISO) and Blu-Ray movie disks. The last physical PC game I bought was the first Witcher in the CompUSA going out of business sale. Before that it was Unreal Tournament 2004.
 
jbltecnicspro said:
I'm pretty sure Skyrim did have the content on the disc. It's version 1.2 (at least mine was), so upon installing it, you need to download the latest patches anyways.
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I could be recalling the wrong game, but at least 2 of the last few games I bought on disc required the game content to be downloaded in it's entirety.

After a bit of looking, it looks it was an issue where for some Steam activated, disc based games, it'll try to download the game before installing it from the disc. You have to stop the download and delete the files to force it to install from the disc itself.

See here:

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php+++++++5357-FSQM-0382
 
Fire488 said:
It would actually be cheaper for the game developers to create a custom USB 3.0 flash drive to use for their games instead of disks...Many PC's don't even come with a CD/DVD/BluRay anymore...Think of the speed difference too. For that matter no install needed you could just play them off the flash drive and then everyone would have an SSD. Even with the USB 3.0 it still has to be faster than hard disk drives or BluRay drives.
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I would love to see the day optical media is replaced completely by USB drives. I think it will be the only practical way to distribute 4k media without ridiculous amounts of compression. And at 5 Gbps, USB 3.0 is already 18x faster than the 8x speed read rate of Blu-ray (288 Mbps).
 
Zepher said:
3.1 and 95 weren't that many floppies. My Newtek Video Toaster 4000 software for my Amiga was on 45 floppies. I think Windows NT 3.51 was on 25 or so floppies, I paid my little sister $5 to swap the floppies on that NT install, lol.
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It was alot to me lol. Windows 3.1 I think was like six. Then 95 had 13, not long after that I got a CD-ROM. I was not a fan of installing operating systems from floppies.
 
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H-street said:
FFXIII was the full bluray size download - 49Gb
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That is an extreme case (for now...). I know GTAV is going to be 60GiB installed. But it seems that the average size of a game these days is around 30GiB.
 
How many of these installs are artificially inflated because of including uncompressed sound files?
 
qbanb8582 said:
Thats hilarious! I remember installing windows 3.1 and 95 from floppies. Lets just say I don't miss floppies at all.
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Amen Brother!....Amen!

Games have come a long way - Remember when games would fit on a 5 1/4" floppy?
 
I was actually thinking about this a few days ago. More software should just come on usb drives. If they can make usb/drives fast enough you could just run the game directly from there... kinda like carts for NES :-D
 
I'd rather not have a bunch of flash drives scattered everywhere.

While we're talking what-ifs...why not simply just say "what if there were no bandwidth caps?" Ding - problem solved, digital distribution is now the answer.
 
are you actually installing the game from the disks?...if so then why would it take 3 days to download?...wouldn't it be much faster then digital downloads?
 
I've got 150 Mbps unlimited internet. I don't need Bluray. I would support the move however.
 
polonyc2 said:
are you actually installing the game from the disks?...if so then why would it take 3 days to download?...wouldn't it be much faster then digital downloads?
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That is what the window says when installing from disc. I remember installing Bioshock Infinite from disc and seeing the same thing. However, due to my curiosity, my network activity didn't show anything downloading during the install. It didn't start downloading the patch until after the game was fully installed and activated.

It also is estimating three days because he took the screenshot right when installation started with only 5MB being shown in the progress bar. Remember that disc drives require time to spin up and gets faster the closer to the edge of the surface it gets.
 
Last game on physical media I bought was CIV V... which immediately caused it to be DL'd on Steam. lol

Don't see the point for most people anymore, unless you have major bandwidth issues, then again the patches now, they can be as big as the entire damn game. :rolleyes:
 
Need to skip discs completely and just sell USB sticks. Then they could put some demos and marketing crap on there as well. And we could re-use them sticks if we wanted to, like when we accidentally buy games like Rage or something, we could re-purpose the stick for prOn or something.
 
Saturn_V said:
How many of these installs are artificially inflated because of including uncompressed sound files?
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not sure how much uncompressed sound files are in BF4, but my install with all the DLC is 58GB.
 
DarkLegacy said:
The last PC game I purchased on disc was Fallout New Vegas. I've been 100% steam since that point.
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Same, but Fallout 3. the one exception is I bought DA:inquisition thru Amazon for my daughter (EA don't grok 'gifting')

I can't honestly say the last time I opened the drive on my desktop PC.
 
What is this... Blu Ray thing you're speaking of?

Physical media?

I don't get it... :confused:

I just click a button, and my games are installed automatically.
 
J3RK said:
What is this... Blu Ray thing you're speaking of?

Physical media?

I don't get it... :confused:

I just click a button, and my games are installed automatically.
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+1

My computer doesn't even have an optical drive.
 
Parja said:
+1

My computer doesn't even have an optical drive.
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My main PC doesn't. My living-room PC does, but that's only so I can occasionally pop in a movie that I don't have access to via Netflix, cable, local storage, or other streaming method.
 
crusty_juggler said:
PC games go Blu Ray? Hell, PC gamers are ditching optical drives altogether.

How many people here on [H] have no optical drive in their gaming rig? I bet it's a fairly large number. I myself have a Blu Ray drive, but if I didn't possess the need to rip BDs to my Plex server, I would have never bought one.

No way PC gamers are going to start adopting Blu Ray drives. Physical media, of any type, is falling by the wayside. The last game I bought on physical disk was Fallout 3, and that was only because I had a Dell giftcard and surprisingly, Dell sells (or did sell) PC games on disk. Guess what? That disk is now a coaster on my desk, as I bought Fallout 3 and Fallout: NV on Steam for less than the cost of a pack of smokes.
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Yeah I have a few friends that still have them in there machines but they def dont use them for games. Everything is digital now, at least on the PC side.
 
DPI said:
Maybe one day a download service called Steam will be invented, and it'll be amazing because you won't need discs.
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Maybe one day everyone will have fast and stable internet. Not a problem you or I but it is for many.
 
redrage said:
I was actually thinking about this a few days ago. More software should just come on usb drives. If they can make usb/drives fast enough you could just run the game directly from there... kinda like carts for NES :-D
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I work for an architectural / engineering firm and a few years ago copies of our subscription autodesk software came on thumbdrives. Now it's just a piece of paper with a serial number and a link to download.
 
I bought the boxed version of Evolve from Amazon (because I had some store credit)...it comes with all those DVD's but I didn't touch them...just go into Steam and enter the serial key and it downloads directly through Steam (same as if you bought it through Steam)
 
Saturn_V said:
How many of these installs are artificially inflated because of including uncompressed sound files?
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Pretty sure everybody uses some level of file compression on assets like that these days. I'd prefer they keep bit-rate compression out of it, gotta have that crisp clean feeling. Farcry 3 and 4 both compress their dialogue sections at the bitrate level and as a result in world NPC's sound like they recorded everything through a telephone.
 
Instead of Blu-Ray, they should move to flash drives. The price has come so far down that boxed games should be put on a read-only usb key and send it out. I've been 100% steam for a couple years now minus a few games that Steam doesn't carry.
 
Yeah flash is cheap these days. Locked usb stick (game cartridge?) makes more sense than bluray.

Kinda funny though, how things go around. First games on consoles were on ROM carts but moved on to optical media because it was cheaper and had more space. Now the flash is cheap and allows massive sizes so we may see a switch back to carts (or sticks. Still chip based) if console gaming stays alive. Pc is already ready for giving up optical media for good as far as physical media is concerned. Might as well as be first, the consoles will follow.
 
They should really switch to flash drives for physical distribution if its more than one disc.
 
Sp33dFr33k said:
They should really switch to flash drives for physical distribution if its more than one disc.
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That makes no sense from a cost standpoint. 32GB flash drive ~$10-$15. 4x DVD-R DL ~$2.50. That's going based off retail prices. Obviously anyone bulk manufacturing is going to get a much better price, but no matter what disks are always going to be a fraction of the cost.

Consoles are going to remain disk based no matter what, and with PC gaming, DD rules the roost. I'm sure a very small percentage of people still buy disk based PC games. What would the point be of developing a new, most expensive method of distributing games for an extremely small percentage of their total buyers?
 
I, as a PC Gamer, am not ditching my optical drive for any reason as I have a very large collection of games on CD / DVD which are not present on Steam or any other online service.

It would be very cool if games were on flash drives. Installing from optical discs is a relatively slow and time consuming process especially if the game is a multi-disk set. Flash drives would eliminate the need to continually swap out discs and are relatively cheap to boot.

crusty_juggler said:
PC games go Blu Ray? Hell, PC gamers are ditching optical drives altogether.
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