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this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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While I will freely admit that the lack of a physical drive is a huge way to drive downloaded (and licensed, revokable) content controlled by the company, it's worth noting that physical media is really not all that great a medium for transferring things like games or movies anymore. Blu-ray discs can hold, in ideal situations, around 50GB of data. A lot of games -- especially AAA games, are well beyond that. I think Spider Man 2 came in at like 85GB? The internet says Hogwarts Legacy is ~75GB on XBox.
Network connectivity, and downloading content to our devices is almost certainly going to be the way a lot of the world works going forward. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to back our content up elsewhere, or offload it to some other device.
Your right in noting that the laws and regulations need to keep up and protect consumers' right to the content they've purchased.
edit: Here, I'll bold the important part.
I bought a 1TB micro SD card recently, it cost less than a new AAA game. Almost any individual AAA game would fit on a quarter of that.
Then put the games onto high-storage solid-state cartridges like Nintendo does. There’s no reason to be limited by existing technology like Blu-Ray except for laziness. Hell, they could even just put an SD card reader in as the physical game tray and put games onto SD cards if they’re that lazy and don’t want to spend on R&D.
Removing the capacity to have physical copies of games at all is always a bad move that is disingenuously masked with a “but the world is going all digital!” all the while knowing that this gives them greater control over things we’re supposed to own.
Would the reading speed of those SD cards be as fast as the reading speed of Blurays? Or is the reading part of using Blurays unnecessary in the first place because most of the game is loaded onto the console itself?
I imagine you could write-protect the SD cards the same way you do with Blurays, so if the question above is a non-issue, then that'd be quite a cool solution. SD cards pushing terabytes easily now, they'd be large enough for sure.
But then again, afaik, the discs are not really needed and don't need to accommodate that much space in them except for licensing and DRM stuff, I think, since the majority of the game is downloaded regardless, right?
Disc speeds are notoriously slow. PS vs N64, Cartridge based systems were instant where as discs had to be loaded into a ram space/buffer and had terrible load times. The difference back then was that disc's had a boatload more storage where cartridges were very expensive to get any significant capacity. That's still kind of true today, but at scale not nearly as much as it used to be, and max capacity of sd cards are WAY bigger than discs overall.
6x Bluray drives (which is what is in the PS4 for example) read at about 27MB/s. I don't know what speed the PS5 is, but bluray supports up to 72MB/s as a standard and has it's highest capacity at ~100/128 GB.
Meanwhile... You can hop on amazon and buy 200MB/s sd cards no problem. I've seen them as "fast" as 300 MB/s, and as high capacity as 1TB. So easily 3x more bandwidth, and significantly more capacity. Usually costs more though. Some weird side-benefits though... You can actually update the game that lives on the card. You can leave some assets on the card that get called less often when you install to SSD to save space on internal storage. Or if you're live loading assets from the sd card to an internal SSD, any load times will be significantly faster. You CANNOT do these things on spinning disc, it's too slow.
The real difference here is latency though. A disc has to spin... You have a physical laser head that has to seek to a particular sector. That's slow as hell and at the density of tracks that you have to do on BD-XL disks, you can actually overshoot tracks if they're laid out poorly which increases the delay of getting the data. SD cards don't care at all, everything is nearly instantly responsive.
So yes, sd cards are significantly faster than bluray discs in a number of ways.
Edit: Minor edit to make it more clear.
Thanks for the detailed response. Lots of interesting new information!
SD cards rule, then lol
Nintendo's drives are tiny, capacity wise. And expensive enough that publishers won't pay for the "high capacity" (that's still not big enough for games anywhere except the switch, due to how low res assets are) ones.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray#BDXL
Even normal UHD BRDs can and do hold upwards of 100GB, as those can have 4 layers (~25GB each layer).
A lot of game size bloat is due to lazy optimization. Lords of the Fallen on PC--while it had questionable game performance for some folk--the game looked gorgeous and was quite a massive world, yet the download for it was around 40GB.
There are very few games I can think of that warrant being 100+GB. And even if they're more than 100GB, what's stopping them from just using 2 Blu-rays? Remember the PS1 days when games like FF7 had 4 discs? Or when WoW came out, it came with like 8 installation discs or some other absurd number? Blu-rays are more expensive, sure, but I can't imagine games getting to be more than 2 discs long during the lifespan of Blu-ray as a storage medium anyway.
Except that games are broken at release and need day1 patch in order to work. Although you will ship BD, the day update servers are taken down, your physical copy won't allow you to play the game either.
The only question I have is : Is torrenting game patchs / updates concidered piracy as well ? If it is, we are definitely doomed.