giving everyone a 30 GB SSD with their game is not even close to cost effective. Everyone would end up with a USB RAID array eventually.
Honestly physical media is just dead when it comes to video games, and I'm fine with it.
But here's an idea, have a station in stores where you plug in your flash drive and the game is put on your device after buying.. It's not without its downsides but it would work better than having to use 50 dvd's, optical storage is fucking dead and we should move on. It's not going to stick around like magnetic storage anyway because unlike magnetic tape or disks it is completely inflexible. You have fixed sizes with fixed data limits. Bad news, we still use fucking magnetic tape nowadays for corporate purposes because you can make that strip of tape as long as you want and it's cost effective.
i understand optical disks have evolved, weve gone from CD's with their paltry 700 mb, dvd's with their 4-8, and now blu-ray, but everytime there's a 'leap', there requires an entirely new type of drive to be engineered and bought, imagine if you needed a different motherboard every time they came out with larger hard disks/SSD's or even flash drives? Utter fucking insanity, this is 1 reason why blu-ray never caught on for pc's because the whole thing is based on bullshit.
Equal in stupidity is consoles costing 400$ that can play games at 1080i which is basically 720p at the same quality settings a PC built for the same price can run at 1080p and would certainly outperform it at console resolution and also has all the functionality you get from having a pc instead which is too massive to try and list.
why would you pay 400$ for a weaker, locked down less-functional PC? All the components are repurposed PC parts now because AAA developers cannot be bothered to develop games for 2 different platforms, best to make consoles and computers basically the same but one ends up way worse as a result.
a pro of that is console porting isn't even a thing anymore console games will always run on pc unless there's bs DRM to crack, Console and PC both have x86 architecture now.
a con is that shitty console 1 can't be upgraded to be more powerful by individual component until shitty console 2 comes out and you have to scrap the entire old box and overpay once again for a computer that can't do computer things and runs games worse than a same price computer.
For god's sake. even Nintendo who were basically the last bastion of original hardware, true exclusives and interesting ideas are going to cave in and utilize a PC architecture AMD cpu into their next box.
It feels like the only reason AMD hasn't gone under when you consider how even the best AMD chip being worse performance-wise than over a hundred current nameable Intel ones, is poor people and lazy console R&D, oh and the fact that Intel hasn't managed to corner the market on budget chips, they only look forward.
The fact that for the price you just can't do better than an AMD chip is really keeping them from sinking. But it's also not giving them enough R&D money of their own to actually ever catch up. The fact is: CPU's are an investment, they last a freaking LONG time, essentially forever in my experiences, before burning out whether it's AMD or Intel. the vast majority of people, even those who would be fine with an AMD, save up a little more to get that delicious Intel performance that will mean more if they still are using it 5 or 10 years from now.
I'm using and AMD Phenom II x4 965, a left-over from the final time that AMD released a chip meant to compete with the very best intel chips in terms of price and performance. A bygone era it has become, but I still hold onto it because it's still pretty damn good and I love the spirit of competition it represents.
anyway enough autism from me, this has gone way off-topic.
