A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?
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@pie_flavor Is it open world? I presume that's why you're posting that?
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@blakeyrat Yes.
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@masonwheeler said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
@the_quiet_one said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
I mean, helplessly blowing into your cartridge is a fond pastime but I'm glad I don't have to do that anymore.
When's the last time you blew into a USB stick?
Oh look, someone else who doesn't understand tongue-in-cheek!
Do I seriously have to point out the other common problems with physical media for you to understand my point? That it might break, can be lost, takes up space, has a polluting manufacturing process, and is just more cumbersome to deal with than something that's simply downloaded via the series of tubes.
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@the_quiet_one Do I seriously have to point out the common problems with downloaded media? Slow connections, limited storage space on your device, network outages, and then of course the way your access to your property is entirely at the mercy of the whim of whoever controls the server, who will gladly shut the whole thing down as soon as it stops being profitable enough?
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@the_quiet_one said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
@masonwheeler said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
- Downloads are expensive and just getting worse, particularly in the USA. With a highly uncompetitive broadband industry free to set high prices, and then apply caps and overage fees on top of that, and the repeal of net neutrality removing disincentives to do so, downloading large games is making less sense every day.
If that's true, then Netflix and YouTube must be at the cusp of being wiped out and being replaced with Blockbuster again. But they aren't, so your argument has no merit.
Don't be daft. You can't compare the two things, fortunately the most recent codecs (say, in the last twenty years?) allow for streaming audio and video and you download them as you view the content.
Still, physical media is shite on so many aspects. My brother has had to buy FIFA-whatever again a few times because he happened to bang on the cupboard where his Xbox is standing a few times (don't ask me why) and that caused the DVD to scratch irreparably. It's ridiculous that there is no way (apparently, so he tells me) to have official, genuine physical media replaced in case of damage. (Nobody even try telling me that when you damage stuff it's on you, it's not the same thing as a physical good and you know it). That's just fucked up, when there is no way to backup the data you're buying. You're not even paying for the privilege to play a game, you're paying for the privilege of having access to a disk that may or may not function in the future. Granted, cartridges are far more robust than that. And you can resell them so that's good.
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@dfdub said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
nail in the coffin for GameStop.
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Xbox Game Pass is adding "Sea of Thieves" and future first-party releases to the online platform. It's getting harder to justify paying for a disc.
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@masonwheeler said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
@the_quiet_one Do I seriously have to point out the common problems with downloaded media? Slow connections,
Again, not as slow as delivery trucks.
limited storage space on your device
You yourself, said media storage is less and less of a problem and expense over time. It is even one of your core points in this whole argument.
network outages
Very intermittent and temporary. About as likely as your physical cartridge being out of stock or delayed.
and then of course the way your access to your property is entirely at the mercy of the whim of whoever controls the server, who will gladly shut the whole thing down as soon as it stops being profitable enough?
About as bad as finding your cartridge has been corrupted or lost and finding out the manufacturer has discontinued making copies of the game.
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@admiral_p said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
@the_quiet_one said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
@masonwheeler said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
- Downloads are expensive and just getting worse, particularly in the USA. With a highly uncompetitive broadband industry free to set high prices, and then apply caps and overage fees on top of that, and the repeal of net neutrality removing disincentives to do so, downloading large games is making less sense every day.
If that's true, then Netflix and YouTube must be at the cusp of being wiped out and being replaced with Blockbuster again. But they aren't, so your argument has no merit.
Don't be daft. You can't compare the two things, fortunately the most recent codecs (say, in the last twenty years?) allow for streaming audio and video and you download them as you view the content.
Streaming video takes a lot of bandwidth. That's the point. And if you have a slow connection, either it progressively degrades the quality of the video or it starts buffering.
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@the_quiet_one said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
Again, not as slow as delivery trucks.
What does that matter to a consumer? They go to their brick and mortar, pick it up, take it home, and start playing right away. (Or go to a Redbox.)
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@heterodox As opposed to just clicking a button and it being right there, and a good number of titles can be played while downloading.
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@masonwheeler said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
Slow connections
Still faster than even Amazon Prime. Cheaper also. Your plan is flawed in every single way. You asked Birlliant or Brillant. It is Brillant.
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@heterodox said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
@the_quiet_one said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
Again, not as slow as delivery trucks.
What does that matter to a consumer? They go to their brick and mortar, pick it up, take it home, and start playing right away. (Or go to a Redbox.)
Not sure if you got the memo, but brick and mortar stores are kinda endangered these days. If the tide shifts back to physical cartridges to play games on, it's going to be by way of mail and not driving to a store like grampa used to.
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@the_quiet_one said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
Not sure if you got the memo, but brick and mortar stores are kinda endangered these days.
Not really. There's some grain of truth to that, but it's a massive oversimplification.
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@the_quiet_one said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
Not sure if you got the memo, but brick and mortar stores are kinda endangered these days. If the tide shifts back to physical cartridges to play games on, it's going to be by way of mail and not driving to a store like grampa used to
I don't think that's true. I think it'd move to a Redbox-like model. Rent costs nearly nothing in comparison to a full retail store and people see the opportunity as they're coming into and leaving businesses like grocery stores they have to go to anyway.
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@the_quiet_one
Sony definitely screwed their online PSN store option for the Vita by making their Memory Stick proprietary and a max of 64/128GB
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@masonwheeler said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
Do I seriously have to point out the common problems with downloaded media?
Yes because the entire world seems convinced that physical media is more cumbersome and that digital media is more profitable for business and consumers.
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@heterodox isn't redbox dying too?
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@blakeyrat said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
Nintendo finally gave the fuck up on competing with Xbox and Playstation because they're useless at hardware, so their new "home" console is also their portable console.
Only just. It drains its batteries rather too fast to be a good portable, and is a very high-draw device when it comes to charging (by comparison with other portables) so you have to carry a dedicated charger with you and can't rely on random USB chargers.
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@dkf Mine lasts a few days of the amount I get to play, and if I leave it plugged in to my phone charger while at work it gets enough to charge it over a few hours. The only real annoyance is that it sometimes drains while in my bag, probably because the home button gets pressed at some point
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Actually I think the core assumption here might be flawed:
@masonwheeler said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
DVD-style discs are slow. Blu-Ray data transfer rate is an order of magnitude slower than SSDs.
Yes, optical disks are slow, BUT they can be used just for long-distance transfer, and then cached in a hard drive (or flash memory), meaning if you do it right they only need to be read once.
Google says a PS4 can read discs at 27MB/s, and a blu-ray disc has up to 100GB of capacity. That gives a total read time of around 1 hour.
OK, this seems like a lot, but you don't have to wait 1 hour to play the game. It's not going to need 100% of the data upfront. It can start streaming the parts as they're needed and use the spare time to load the rest. So it would be like 10-20 minutes after putting the game in before it can run without pauses.
Heck, even waiting 1 hour would be faster and cheaper than a regular download for most people.
(random thought: your console could read the disk AND download the game from the internet simultaneously to accelerate the process)
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@anonymous234 said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
(random thought: your console could read the disk AND download the game from the internet simultaneously to accelerate the process)
It already does that. You put in the disk, it starts downloading the 23GB update.
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@pie_flavor Sadly updates kinda ruin the whole physical distribution thing, both discs and cartridges.
Although I suppose cartridges can be rewritable, meaning they could be updated... at the store? If they were willing to open the shrinkwrapped box.
At home? Kinda pointless.
Send them back to the factory and get a new version? Too cumbersome for most shops to bother.
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@masonwheeler said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
Downloads are expensive and just getting worse, particularly in the USA. With a highly uncompetitive broadband industry free to set high prices, and then apply caps and overage fees on top of that, and the repeal of net neutrality removing disincentives to do so, downloading large games is making less sense every day.
So, "getting worse" means "I predict it will get worse in the face of actual evidence?"
@masonwheeler said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
From the business side, supporting large downloads is expensive, because it means you have to have all these enormous game images stored on some cloud server somewhere. Just imagine what Steam's infrastructure costs are!
This seems like a silly thing to worry about. Data centers are being built like crazy. Hard disk space is cheap.
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@masonwheeler said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
It should have been possible to infer this from the context anyway
Some people never learn.
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@anonymous234 said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
There's also a forgotten distribution system
However, possibly the most audacious part of Nintendo’s new scheme was the installation of Disk System Kiosks in retail outlets all over Japan. “These allowed Famicom owners to purchase a blank Disk Card for ¥2000 and then insert it into the kiosk to have a game of their choice written to it for an additional ¥500,” explains Dillard. “Because the Disk Cards were rewritable, consumers could then bring their disk back to the kiosk to have a new game written over it when they'd finished their previous one.”
You could have an online system like Steam but distribute kiosks to allow anyone to download the encrypted files to a USB drive.
Hmm...partnership with Redbox. Those things are everywhere around here.
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@anonymous234 said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
Sadly updates kinda ruin the whole physical distribution thing, both discs and cartridges
But cartridge stuff was tested better, and we were all happy with our SNES without these updates.
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@sockpuppet7
So ... no new/extra content/DLC or online/multiplayer games
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@luhmann They’ll still do it, you’ll just have to rebuy the entire game. (See also Street Fighter II.)
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@admiral_p said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
It's ridiculous that there is no way (apparently, so he tells me) to have official, genuine physical media replaced in case of damage.
Sony and Nintendo only offer warranty replacements though.
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@pie_flavor as does WoW
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@twelvebaud my brother has an Xbox 360 (he has since lost interest in games), apparently if you went to your local shop to have it replaced they wouldn't. I guess you might have to go to the source directly, but that's fucked up anyway.
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@boomzilla said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
Hard disk space is cheap.
Insanely cheap. I can pull updated numbers on our latest gen servers but IIRC our last gen builds were right at a penny per GB at 80% dedup. ~$0.05/GB before dedup.
We are not even maximizing for cost either. That is with a full Windows Server license on a 12-bay chassis. I would imagine a single 45-bay chassis with 8TB drives could hold the entire Steam library. I don't think it would serve it at their scale, but it could hold it.
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@polygeekery I checked, and 1TB HDDs still seem to be $60-$80 on Amazon.
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@pie_flavor I don't get your point.
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@admiral_p said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
It's ridiculous that there is no way (apparently, so he tells me) to have official, genuine physical media replaced in case of damage. [...] And you can resell them so that's good.
I've always thought copyright licenses should work just like physical property: you have a license for X (game, movie, song), you can have as many physical copies of X as you want, you can resell your X license to anyone.
One way to implement that would be to have physical "tokens" to represent them. They could be electronic USB devices with a private key or something to allow devices to authenticate that you have them.
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@polygeekery that's certainly a bit more than a penny per gigabyte.
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@pie_flavor said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
@polygeekery that's certainly a bit more than a penny per gigabyte.
I can only assume you did not read all of my post.
For starters, 4TB drives are $100. 30% more cost, four times the capacity. Which brings it down to $0.04/GB. The hardware to run it on adds another penny. 80% dedup gets you down to $0.01/GB for data on disk.
I might be able to post the spreadsheet if anyone wants to see it. It is for an old build and nothing is proprietary.
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@the_quiet_one said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
Again, not as slow as delivery trucks.
Bullshit. Amazon Prime can deliver a 30GB game on a Blu-Ray faster than you can dowload it on sub-Mb DSL, like my co-worker’s shitty, oversubsribed Verizhit DSL.
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@sirtwist No, not if you live here they don't
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@jaloopa I've noticed that if I plug it into my phone charger on the train, the battery will drain more slowly while playing, but not actually charge. Only the original charger actually charges it when I'm playing.
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@dfdub said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
@jaloopa I've noticed that if I plug it into my phone charger on the train, the battery will drain more slowly while playing, but not actually charge. Only the original charger actually charges it when I'm playing.
If I plug my phone into the car's USB port*, it may or may not charge when I'm using Google Maps to navigate.
(*) With a data blocker. Cause the screen share technology in the car and in the S7 are incompatible - the car is v2.0, the phone is v2.1. Basturds.
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@sirtwist said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
Bullshit. Amazon Prime can deliver a 30GB game on a Blu-Ray faster than you can dowload it on sub-Mb DSL, like my co-worker’s shitty, oversubsribed Verizhit DSL.
But once you get it, there's 18 GB of updates you have to download anyway.
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@jaloopa said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
Mine lasts a few days of the amount I get to play, and if I leave it plugged in to my phone charger while at work it gets enough to charge it over a few hours.
Well, I'm just reporting what my brother told me. It might be that he likes playing games that use more power?
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@dkf Charging while playing is definitely problematic when you don't use the original charger, see my post.
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@blakeyrat said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
@sirtwist said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
Bullshit. Amazon Prime can deliver a 30GB game on a Blu-Ray faster than you can dowload it on sub-Mb DSL, like my co-worker’s shitty, oversubsribed Verizhit DSL.
But once you get it, there's 18 GB of updates you have to download anyway.
Can't you play with internet unplugged?
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@dfdub said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
the original charger
So… it's a high-draw device (because it pulls more than 500mA). Like many modern mobile devices, in fact. Or do they put in extra Apple-like BS?
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@dkf said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
Or do they put in extra Apple-like BS?
Like (unfortunately) most devices, the Switch is not USB-PD compliant:
It's going to take a while until USB Type C chargers become interchangeable. Right now, it seems like every company is still implementing its own thing.
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@dfdub said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
Right now, it seems like every company is still implementing its own thing.
Oh yes, forgot about that sort of shit.
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@dkf The smartphone manufacturers seem to be working on a new Memorandum of Understanding for a common charging standard, so I guess there's some hope for the future. It is rumored that Apple might even include USB-C to Lightning cables in the box with their next generation of phones.
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@dfdub said in A new cartridge-based gaming console: brilliant or brillant?:
it seems like every company is still implementing its own thing.
When Universal is much more local than the word implies...
