Likelyhood of the next xbox inculding a blu-ray drive?

[Emn1ty]

I'm thinking the next gen game sizes would be around 30-50GB mark. Games now are larger than 4GB.

The only games that even approach 25gb+ are MMO's with several expansions already released. The average game these days takes up around 8gb-12gb at MOST. 16gb flash drives are are around $10 now and if they are to be mass produced as a distribution media they'll become even cheaper.

No its not?

Most games are still sold retail but have the option of downloading them digitally. Just like the 360/PS3 has now, games sold in shops but also on the Market for the people who can take advantage of it.

As for flash don't make me laugh, there are four problems.

One, NAND is far more expensive than pressing a disc.

Two, NAND has a finite amount of read/write cycles it wont last more than a few years constantly rewriting games onto it.

Three, Security concerns, if you allow a user to read and write games to the drive its a MASSIVE weak point for security, eventually people could spoof a drive and boom you made it super simple to copy games.

Four, the logistics of having a machine in the stores that a) has the security/encryption, b) has access to the internet to get all the latest releases, c) whos going to pay for the machine, microsoft or the stores?

Flash and digital download only is a pipe dream, by the time it does happen we wont be playing on 'consoles', we will be streaming games over the internet to any device.

I would prefer it to be write only and each game is sold on its own separate drive and run from that drive. Thus you avoid the finite number of writes and save any changing files/updates etc to the internal drive on the console. Most of your issues can be solved by distributing them in the same fashion as discs (except that they are more reliable and read faster which means faster load times). The only true statement is the expense, but flash drives will become cheaper and that is inevitable. Less than $10 for the media required to hold practically any normal game that has been released in the last 4 years or will be released in the next 2-3 is pretty good so far.

This would also eliminate the need for an optical drive, allowing for the "super slim" form factor that may be desired next generation.

[HawkMan]

The only games that even approach 25gb+ are MMO's with several expansions already released. The average game these days takes up around 8gb-12gb at MOST. 16gb flash drives are are around $10 now and if they are to be mass produced as a distribution media they'll become even cheaper.

Max Payne 3, BF3, Skyrim ....

[TheLegendOfMart]

The only games that even approach 25gb+ are MMO's with several expansions already released. The average game these days takes up around 8gb-12gb at MOST. 16gb flash drives are are around $10 now and if they are to be mass produced as a distribution media they'll become even cheaper.

I would prefer it to be write only and each game is sold on its own separate drive and run from that drive. Thus you avoid the finite number of writes and save any changing files/updates etc to the internal drive on the console. Most of your issues can be solved by distributing them in the same fashion as discs (except that they are more reliable and read faster which means faster load times). The only true statement is the expense, but flash drives will become cheaper and that is inevitable. Less than $10 for the media required to hold practically any normal game that has been released in the last 4 years or will be released in the next 2-3 is pretty good so far.

This would also eliminate the need for an optical drive, allowing for the "super slim" form factor that may be desired next generation.

DVDs cost pennies to press, they would have to set up a whole new manufacturing plant to make these flash drives, do you really think that Microsoft would eat the expense of setting all that up and producing the carts?

No it would be passed on to the consumer meaning money on top of the already expensive game cost. Theres a reason why Nintendo uses Gigabit instead of Gigabyte carts for its handhelds. You would need at least 32GB rom carts in case of future needs and they arent cheap.

[bjoswald]

I assume it to be highly unlikely since most consumers don't even buy Blu-Ray discs often enough to use in conventional Blu-Ray players. As someone else has already said, "Blu-Ray is as dead as the DVD" at this point.

[LaP]

Likelyhood is 100% unless MS likes to shot itself in the foot.

[TheLegendOfMart]

I assume it to be highly unlikely since most consumers don't even buy Blu-Ray discs often enough to use in conventional Blu-Ray players. As someone else has already said, "Blu-Ray is as dead as the DVD" at this point.

######?

What makes you think Blu-Ray is dead?

http://www.the-numbe...ray-sales-chart

http://www.the-numbe...ly/thisweek.php

Its selling pretty well for a 'dead' format. Pretty much matching DVD for number of sales and profit.

[LaP]

I'm reading this thread and it looks like MS will release the new console now and replace it after 1 year only.

You don't need 20 gigs for games. People don't buy Blu-Ray.

It might be true now. Might be not 5-7 years from now. I remember when Nintendo released the GameCube the lack of a DVD player was such a big deal. I was a moderator at GameSpot back then and it was the main complain about the console (this and the purple color).

It's not a big deal now cause the Xbox 360 had a head start, is already popular and has a very big library of awesome games.

But what if Sony release the PS4 at the same time as the XBox 1080. The PS4 does have blu-ray support but the XBox 1080 doesn't. The PS4 has a good launch lineup with good exclusive first party titles.

I think it would be a very dumb move by MS.

[TheLegendOfMart]

a) You do need 20Gb for games especially when the next gen consoles will probably feature 1080p more you need higher detailed models, higher resolution textures, etc.. these all take up space.

b) People do buy Blu-ray, look at the sales figures i quoted.

[thommcg]

Don't think Microsoft can eliminate physical media due to inconsistent Internet access.

Or at least, if they do, Sony and Nintendo aren't and I can't imagine Microsoft would happily lose all those sales. [Full disclosure - I only have mobile "broadband" and a 15GB monthly data allowance. Real broadband is not available :(]

[Emn1ty]

Max Payne 3, BF3, Skyrim ....

I don't remember Skyrim being larger than 20gb pre HD patch (I just checked and Steam marks it as a 7gb download). Dead Space 2 is 9gb, RUSE is about 5.5gb, Alan Wake is 7gb, Shogun 2 14gb, Arkham City is 15gb, etc.

Max Payne is 32gb on PC, but installs to the 360 at 15gb of space. I'm sure they could easily bring it down to sub 20gb. Either way, you've named two games which have come in above that. Looking at games I got only a few days ago such as Sins of a Solar Empire Rebllion (a 4gb game with 3 expansions plus new content). Although the consoles should always be in a position to provide lower resolution textures due to the viewing medium they are targeting: Televisions. Sitting 4-10ft away from your TV I doubt any textures over 1024 are really going to make much of a difference.

DVDs cost pennies to press, they would have to set up a whole new manufacturing plant to make these flash drives, do you really think that Microsoft would eat the expense of setting all that up and producing the carts?

No it would be passed on to the consumer meaning money on top of the already expensive game cost. Theres a reason why Nintendo uses Gigabit instead of Gigabyte carts for its handhelds. You would need at least 32GB rom carts in case of future needs and they arent cheap.

DVD's are not the discussion. DVD's are locked at 7.8gb dual layer. Blu-Ray can hold 25gb on a standard disc, 50gb on dual layer. Btw, an equivalent Blu-Ray rewritable disc comes out to the same price per GB with a 25gb disc being around $14 and a 16gb flash being anwhere between $6-$10 (Blu-Ray is $1.50 per GB while Flash is $1.70). They have relatively the same production value. And don't be insane about saying MS has to build a bunch of factories to produce it. You think Microsoft makes their own DVD's? They'll purchase in bulk from a manufacturer. You don't have to make your own distribution media and all Microsoft would have to do is contract already existing companies who produce flash drives to make more of them.

Not to mention using flash media for distribution would drastically cut down load times.

[TheLegendOfMart]

DVD's are not the discussion. DVD's are locked at 7.8gb dual layer. Blu-Ray can hold 25gb on a standard disc, 50gb on dual layer. Btw, an equivalent Blu-Ray rewritable disc comes out to the same price per GB with a 25gb disc being around $14 and a 16gb flash being anwhere between $6-$10 (Blu-Ray is $1.50 per GB while Flash is $1.70). They have relatively the same production value. And don't be insane about saying MS has to build a bunch of factories to produce it. You think Microsoft makes their own DVD's? They'll purchase in bulk from a manufacturer. You don't have to make your own distribution media and all Microsoft would have to do is contract already existing companies who produce flash drives to make more of them.

Not to mention using flash media for distribution would drastically cut down load times.

What?

Of course they make their own DVDs, they don't burn them like regular discs they get printed and pressed. I know Sony presses ALL the blu-ray games because third parties have spoke about missing the deadline to get the game to Sony ready for pressing.

16Gb isn't enough for 'next gen', they are struggling to make games fit on dual layers this generation, having to sacrifice quality to make it fit, quite a few games have come on multiple discs. Companies don't pay retail cost for discs, I don't have any hard facts but I have a feeling that pressing a Blu-Ray is FAR cheaper than creating a flash cart.

http://www.newcyberian.com/bluray-replication.html

Hardly scientific data but if they order in bulk the cost is under a dollar per disc.

[neufuse Veteran]

There are services which stream at 1080p, which is good enough for most people. I think the "it must be of ultimate visual quality, 20.1 channel audio" crowd is pretty small these days.

I just have to laugh at that statement..... I could stream 1080p at 2Mbps and it could look horrible, I could then stream 1080p at 60Mbit and have it look just like a blu-ray disc.... problem is ISP's would go nuts giving that much throughput to all their users and with metered billing it would drive the consumer nuts paying twice for everything... I don't think the average user is going to like wasting 50+GB for a 2 hr movie at blu-ray quality....

(1080p just being the format, not the number of pixels pushed per frame, as compression will determin how much is updated per frame...)

everyone thinks netflix and others are taking over, but lets be honest their compression makes the picture quality suck especially during high motion films / stuff like sports.. it's bad enough at times when satalite HD providers compress it down to 10Mbit/s channels and you have artifacts everywhere... even at 16Mbit/s on cable its blah at times

[Emn1ty]

Of course they make their own DVDs, they don't burn them like regular discs they get printed and pressed. I know Sony presses ALL the blu-ray games because third parties have spoke about missing the deadline to get the game to Sony ready for pressing.

They don't do it in their own factories, they have third party companies manufacture such things. Microsoft is well known for being software. The only hardware they make is the Xbox and its peripherals even then I think it is out sourced. Microsoft isn't even making their own tablets/phones. I can't find any evidence that Microsoft physically manufactures their own DVD's, so if you could point me to it then by all means.

16Gb isn't enough for 'next gen', they are struggling to make games fit on dual layers this generation, having to sacrifice quality to make it fit, quite a few games have come on multiple discs. Companies don't pay retail cost for discs, I don't have any hard facts but I have a feeling that pressing a Blu-Ray is FAR cheaper than creating a flash cart.

The point is price comparison per gb. They are roughly the same, 16gb, 32gb, whatever. In terms of pricing I cannot find an adaquate resource to gauge what an actual 100,000 usb drive purchase would cost you. I doubt it would be more than a $.80 to $1 which is still fairly cheap. I know you could probably get 1gb drives for less than a dimeeach at that volume.

[HawkMan]

I don't remember Skyrim being larger than 20gb pre HD patch (I just checked and Steam marks it as a 7gb download). Dead Space 2 is 9gb, RUSE is about 5.5gb, Alan Wake is 7gb, Shogun 2 14gb, Arkham City is 15gb, etc.

Pre HD Patch :rolleyes: well future games are going to be pretty damn HD are they not. and the size of the game on the 370 is rather irrelevant as we're talking next gen, HD 1080p games, with hgih detail textures and models. you can't base future size on todays consoles.

We're going forward, games are improving and high res textures is one of the things that will really eat up space on future games.

[Emn1ty]

Pre HD Patch :rolleyes: well future games are going to be pretty damn HD are they not. and the size of the game on the 370 is rather irrelevant as we're talking next gen, HD 1080p games, with hgih detail textures and models. you can't base future size on todays consoles.

We're going forward, games are improving and high res textures is one of the things that will really eat up space on future games.

The HD patch was around 4gb if I remember, which means the game still only hits 11gb or so. Compression will also get better and more space saving measures will be taken to get more on ever "shrinking" media.

[HawkMan]

Umm no, compression is no magic bullet that gets better and better, we're at a limit at what compression can do without losing quality.

[Ambroos]

I'm quite sure they'll be going for Blu-ray. They don't really have a choice. It's either that, HD-DVD or creating another format that'll die before it's properly released. For everyone saying no physical media, they'll never do that as long as there are physical shops trying to sell physical boxes.

Games are usually too big to download. When people buy something they usually want to play it as soon as possible, not wait a few hours for everything to get downloaded. For movies, well, if you think you can get Blu-ray quality video streamed over an internet connection properly, think again. You'd require at least a stable 30Mbps connection to be able to stream one at 1080p with a good audio stream. And I still think the server infrastructure and bandwidth costs probably aren't too far from the cost of actually creating a Blu-ray disc.

[TheLegendOfMart]

The HD patch was around 4gb if I remember, which means the game still only hits 11gb or so. Compression will also get better and more space saving measures will be taken to get more on ever "shrinking" media.

What's the point in putting a really powerful cpu/gpu in it and 1080p graphics if you are going to compress the hell out of the textures/audio making it look like a Wii game. You build it for the future, current gen games are appearing 12-25Gb, you are going to need 32Gb MINIMUM for next gen games.

[Emn1ty]

Umm no, compression is no magic bullet that gets better and better, we're at a limit at what compression can do without losing quality.

If not compression, space saving tricks within engines. There are plenty of ways to make something look better than it actually is.

What's the point in putting a really powerful cpu/gpu in it and 1080p graphics if you are going to compress the hell out of the textures/audio making it look like a Wii game. You build it for the future, current gen games are appearing 12-25Gb, you are going to need 32Gb MINIMUM for next gen games.

Compression isn't evil. It doesn't force a loss in quality like many people think it does (that is unless you do it wrong). There is no reason not to compress things. Why have a 2048 texture for something that is not only prevalent, but unimportant? Like a rock? What is the point? Games are about gameplay. Some of my favorite games were not revolutionary in the graphics department. I'd rather more content than higher resolution textures.

[HawkMan]

The best way is to simply make the game look better. with your logic the xbox would have shipped with a CD drive

Games this gen of games do fine an a DVD or two. but for next gen, it's just not gonna cut it.

[Emn1ty]

The best way is to simply make the game look better. with your logic the xbox would have shipped with a CD drive

Games this gen of games do fine an a DVD or two. but for next gen, it's just not gonna cut it.

Um, no. My point is not that games aren't going to get bigger, but that regardless of the size developers are still going to try and save space. Smaller files, lower polygons, etc all mean faster load times and smoother visuals. Again, I'd prefer the extra space to go to giving the game more content over doubling texture resolution. Sure, I download the texture packs for Skyrim and a ton of mods which up the visual quality. But my favorite mods are weapon, armor, wildlife additions, improvements to combat mechanics, etc. 6GB of content will always be better than 20GB of textures.

[TheLegendOfMart]

Why does it have to be either, or?

It doesn't make any sense to limit the amount of storage per game on a next gen console, you can have content AND nice graphics....

Of course games are going to get bigger, PS3 exclusives are already bigger than 360 exclusives and they are all the better for it, look at Uncharted 2 - 25Gb, Uncharted 3 - 45Gb, PS3 exclusives average around 30Gb and look arguably better than any third party game.

The 360 held back third parties this generation, they look almost exactly the same and play the same on both consoles, developers cant take advantage of the bigger disc in the PS3 because then the 360 would look weaker.

Optical storage isn't going anywhere soon.

[HawkMan]

Um, no. My point is not that games aren't going to get bigger, but that regardless of the size developers are still going to try and save space. Smaller files, lower polygons, etc all mean faster load times and smoother visuals. Again, I'd prefer the extra space to go to giving the game more content over doubling texture resolution. Sure, I download the texture packs for Skyrim and a ton of mods which up the visual quality. But my favorite mods are weapon, armor, wildlife additions, improvements to combat mechanics, etc. 6GB of content will always be better than 20GB of textures.

Yeah they're going to next gen, they're not going to reduce polygons, compress textures or any such thing. We're getting more polygons, we're getting higher res texture and more textures(new shaders need mor etexture layers, like before we used to have diffuse maps and bumps maps, then we got spec maps. then normal maps. and parrallax and there will be more to come.

Also content and textures are made by different teams so...

basically there's no way the next xbox is limited to DVD size. BD is more or less confirmed. but if it isn't it'll be something else similar or better, maybe HVD

[Emn1ty]

I'm honestly just tired of media that degrades by just sitting around (aka scratches and such). A usb drive avoids that. It doesn't matter how much it can hold if a mere shift in alignment or the disk popping out of the case can scratch it so badly the media is unreadable. With a flash drive, I could juggle my console and not have to worry about screwing my $60 (or quite possibly $75) game up in the next generation. A solid state media sounds far more reliable and forward than more optical discs. Not to mention it minimizes complexity, noise, heat, size, load times, etc. While directly compared to discs flash media may not seem as viable, but it brings with it a lot of benefits that would improve the next generation of consoles particularly in how they are constructed.

[Ambroos]

BD is more or less confirmed. but if it isn't it'll be something else similar or better, maybe HVD

Wikipedia:

However, holographic drives are projected to initially cost around US$15,000, and a single disc around US$120?180, although prices are expected to fall steadily.^[5] Since InPhase Technologies were unable to deliver their promised product, they ran out of funds, and went bankrupt in 2010. ^[6]

^{So nope :p}