Topic: No Disk Drive?

Ever since Nintendo started to bring every retail game to the eShop, I had thoughts about a generation where all games would be digital. Since I pretty much a collector, I would hate if that really happened.

I don't get all the hate against digital only. I hate to change the disc everytime you want to play a different game. That's so annoying and outdated! Even on PC you don't have to do that anymore (even if you bought the game on a disc).
SSBU is the only game I have in the disc tray of my Wii U (and only because I got it cheaper that way), all the other games I bought digitally.

To all the people being against it because of collector reasons: You should be well aware that optical discs are not a suitable medium to store/conserve things. They are the least reliable storage option there is. It takes between 5-15 years for them to become unreadable. So if anyone of you calls himself a real collector, you should be against optical discs.

Also, not only do nowaday's consoles offer preload, but also an option to download games remotely or in standby. Having a good or at least decent internet connection should be self-evident, I don't get why anyone would settle with less. After all, you choose (in the scope of what life gives you to deal with) yourself where you live and which internet provider you sign up with. The last time I moved, I immediately chose the fastest connection possible, which is 200Mbit (I didn't have this luxury before, so I know how it feels to have a bad or only half-way decent connection). It was a no-brainer for me. I don't care how much it costs, it's just a matter of principle. I want the fastest connection there is.

But as a compromise, for those who may not be able (life throws manifold obstacles in your way) to live/move somewhere with a better internet connection, there still would be another way: Flash memory. It could be SD cards, it could be USB sticks, it could be a proprietary flash medium. But it's way better than optical discs. BTW, Cartridges (like those for the 3DS) are just flash memory, too.

@shani:
It's all good and well to say "just move to an area that has better internets" but... it's not always that easy. For example in the city I live in there's one area where there's full fibre infrastucture with the option for plans up to 100/40Mbps and beyond. It's not like there are a lot of options there either, half of that area is very expensive and the other half is mostly commercial. And you'd have to be in a particular space to be able to move now. That infrastructure was only planned maybe 5 years ago and was only turned on a couple of years ago. It's a pretty narrow window.

And the only reason the service hasn't continued to expand from there is because of a change in government. The new government wants to deploy infrastructure that delivers something closer to 50Mbps. Again with boundaries that aren't exactly set in stone. Some people getting this infrastructure may have well moved to those areas under the impression that they were next on the list for FTTH. Their neighbours may be getting FTTH.

The rest of the city? Well we're all stuck on 5-15Mbps. And needless to say the "rest" is a pretty big space. It covers some of the less busy outer-suburbs, the cheaper areas, the most expensive areas. The entire spectrum. And it's a big city. I'm about 20km away from the nearest suburb that has a service that's better than my ~8Mbps connection. Five years ago I seriously thought it'd be rolled out closer to 5km from where I am. You can't plan for that.

All of this, and especially the bolded, is an extraordinarily piss-poor attitude How is it even possible to have a 200Mbit connection, and yet be so out-of-touch with the world around you?

I absolutely hate digital because I never like I honestly OWN the game, Unlike music or movies where If I buy it digital most of the time I get a MP3 or some sorta Digital file and I can burn it to a disc or something. I cant do that for video games.

@skywake: Of course it's not that easy. That's what I meant with "in the scope of what life gives you to deal with" and "life throws manifold obstacles in your way".
I don't know for Australia but until a few years ago, a 16 Mbit DSL connection was considered the maximum in Germany. Meaning that not even everyone had those 16 Mbit.
But since cable internet got established more and more, you actually get 50Mbit cable for the same price of 16Mbit DSL. That still is the case (still many people only have 16Mbit DSL). So it's not even more expensive.

@CaviarMeths: I don't know how you come to this conclusion. I had a rubbish or even no internet connection for my whole life (except for a few years in a students dorm) so when I moved last winter, imagine how happy I was to finally get a fast internet connection. Still, I could've have that earlier if I had put that above other things. It was my own choice.
But maybe you just got me wrong. Let me put it this way: If someone decides to move to the countryside, they can't afterwards complain about slow internet. Because it's a known fact that the providers don't provide fast internet there (not because they can't, but because they don't want to). So they have to devide between fast internet and whatever it is that they love about the countryside.
I mean, for all I know - last winter I couldn't find a new appartement for month and was stranded at a friend's, so I was really desperate - I could've ended up somewhere else where I can't get cable internet. In that case I would've been stuck with 16Mbit DSL max. But while searching for an appartement it was always one of my highest priorities that cable internet is available there. So after every apartment showing, when I got home, the first thing I did was check if our local cable provider offered cable internet for that location. Because I was just tired of having slow internet for practically my whole life.

Just to make a further point about the "just move to where there's better internet" thing. This is part of the city where I live, maybe about 1/3rd of the total area of it. The bit where there is "fast internet" available:

The Blue areas have plans upto 100Mbps available with the potential to get faster speeds down the track. Everywhere else as of today only has ADSL, you'll get 10Mbps on average. Most of the brown areas will be getting those 100Mbps plans within the next year or so. Some of them are only going to get FTTN with speeds closer to 50-80Mbps. The Green areas are a couple of years away from FTTN. Everywhere else? Who knows.

And five years ago none of those areas were known. Three years ago it was entirely possible that we were all getting FTTH. Some of the areas which were going to get it early are now not even on the schedule. The areas not-covered? At this point it's hard to know what we'll get or when. And for the starting areas it was almost a lottery who got what. It wasn't long ago that even having this much coverage would have been unthinkable. It's easy to say "just move to an area that has it".... the reality is far more complex.

If the NX is going to be cartridge based, and if it looks like a NES from the future, then Nintendo will become huge again.

@skywake: As I just posted, I know how hard it can be. I was without a flat for months because in my city (because of the lack of housing) it's really hard to get a flat at all. In my first post, I really thought it would be given that it's not that easy to get what one wants. I was just pointing out that we still make our own choices and one could try to put the internet connection above everything else.

But after revisiting my post, I really don't get what's so wrong about it. I never wrote "just move to an area that has better internets". Maybe you guys should just read more carefully and don't take everything out of context just to get worked up about it. I wrote:

*Like me and my ex flatmate did in 2010 because he had doubts about the cable provider, so we got 16Mbit DSL which constantly failed and when it was working, only provided like 4-9 MBit. Instead we should've gotten cable internet (for the same price!) back then and be happy with 50 or even 100Mbit.

With all that out of the way, I think it's a shame that internet providers still offer the same internet connections that were standard in 2004. Everyone - no matter where they live - should have cable, FTTN (we don't even have that yet in Germany) or whatever is faster than average DSL. The internet providers could easily offer that to everyone, even in the countryside. They just won't do it because they don't want to pay the costs. But they make so much money and also get subsidies from the government - that's what happens if you let companies do what they want, they are just looking for profit, not for progress.

I'm a digital only person, but that should not mean online only for people, if that makes sense. I mean, it is the future and yes, it is much better in most cases but not even most modern societies have adequate infrastructure for volume transfers.

But I wouldn't be surprised to see nintendo bite the bullet despite this reality and just go with it. The retail channel, marketing to them, fighting for shelf space, the physical production costs - they are most definitely things nintendo will want to drop sooner rather than later.

Perhaps extensive preloading mechanisms will be featured in the next platform. Or discs are out but sd cards are in (there's more size and speed in those anyway) - or cards buy you an install, or a 95% loaded game. Who knows?

As of today, though, I don't think everybody has a good enough internet available to make this experience as seamless as it should be in the future.

In my understanding, digital only doesn't necessarily have to mean online only. But I think it's the right way to go nevertheless. Just ask the PC players and you will hear none of them complain. Why? Because Steam just works so well!
But I don't see any problem in digital only = downloads + flash memory (for the minority that doesn't want to download). Even with a really slow internet connection, you can download almost every game over night. So a nowadays usual preload period of a few days (= a weekend) should be sufficient. If not, they could extend it up to a week for the really big games. But I don't think that would be necessary. With scheduled downloads during night, you wouldn't even have to lift a finger to download your game.

Umm, you literally said people choose where they live and what service they subscribe to. I don't know how else anyone was supposed to read what you were saying. Adding extra content to your post after the fact makes it even more clear what you were saying wasn't clear. If it was clear what you meant you wouldn't need to clear things up now would you

But if your point was that a lot of people don't really have the option to pick what service they get? That it's not as simple as just moving to an area that has a better service? Then clearly we agree. Because that's precisely the point I was trying to make to counter what I had rightfully assumed you meant. There are more reasons people live in the areas they do than just the internet services available. And even if it is a top priority for some people it's sometimes hard to know which areas will and won't get the service. It's far more complicated than just "getting better internets"

Yeah everyone chooses where they live, like I wanted to move to a different country for so long, but I didn't. So I'm the only one to blame for this. But to be fair, the differences in internet speed aren't that big here, that is if you don't move to the countryside.
And as I mentioned, me and my ex flatmate chose the slower connection over the faster one, so that was also our - wrong - choice.
Everything else you just interpreted and put into my mouth. But since that happened, I had to clear it up so you get what I meant and nothing else.

See, that's where you're wrong. I don't know for other countries, but here you can just go to the website of any Internet, Telephone or TV provider, type in the adress and they show you exactly (which tariff, which internet speed, which channels, etc) what they offer for that precise location. As I wrote earlier, getting super fast internet was a top priority for me. Because of my work, because of gaming (Steam downloads and streaming in the future), but mostly because I had rubbish internet from 1998-2008, then 100Mbit through the university from 2008-2010, then again rubbish internet from 2010-2014. I always felt constrained in my use of the internet and was just fed up with it. Those two years with lightspeed internet were a revelation to me. So being able to have at least 100Mbit again was as important for me as having a kitchen in my flat.

As I explained twice before this, it's not as simple as that for everyone. Using the example of the city I live in three years ago there was no option other than ADSL. Five years ago there were plans for FTTH but only confirmation for one suburb and no guarantee it would go ahead. It's not as simple as just checking a website and knowing what areas will get what. What areas will get what is constantly in flux.

You said you don't know for other countries. So don't assume that it's the same for everyone as it is for you. Because where I live what areas get what sort of infrastructure has been a lottery. It remains a lottery. You can't expect people to be making decisions on something as big as where to live based on something with that level of uncertainty

Are we all going to ignore/accept this?

The longevity of optical media varies a lot and it all depends on what medium we're talking about and how you take care of it. Whilst unrecorded optical media tends to have a relative short lifespan. Estimations predict up to a 200-year lifespan for recorded optical media, but a 50 to 100-year lifespan seems more plausible (for both DVD-R and CD-R, the latter even longer if taken care of properly). The truth is, nobody has an accurate idea of what the lifespan of optical media is, the first recorded CD-roms in the 70's are still readable today. I still own 20-year old CD-roms and they work perfectly fine. As long as you take proper care of optical media, they last way longer than 5-15 years.

Some things are so obviously wrong they don't need correcting

I can't say I know too much about this, but I believe pressed discs (i.e. mass produced cds and dvds which we get our movies, music, and games on) are expected to last 50+ years with proper care, whereas the discs we burn ourselves are expected to last about a third of the time.

@shaneoh: True, rewritable optical discs generally don't last as long as read-only discs. But it also depends on factors like how often the data is rewritten and the quality of the recording process. However, since video games are pressed on a read-only format, this problem doesn't concern video games.

Maybe CD-Rs might be that bad but I've got plenty of PS1 games (those are approaching 20 years old) that still read fine (though I didn't purchase them 20 years ago ). I've even got a few PC-Engine CDs that are probably older than that (also only relatively recently owned by me).

I don't mind the NX having digital only.

My only issue is whether they will accept all kinds of currency so that people get to buy their products or not? So far, there are two ways to get digital games on 3DS and Wii U. Either get a prepaid card or use credit card. The latter is frustrating because it only accepts cards from specific regions. So if you're from Asia, you're only option is to get a prepaid card. If Nintendo removes prepaid cards for NX and keeps credit cards for specific regions only, then I can't buy their product since I get Nintendo stuff from Dubai most of the time......