Topic: Is Nintendo resting on its laurels?

I don't mind buying games digitally, but I do mind if I feel I'm being forced to do so. XB1 kind of feels like they're forcing the issue. They removed one of the main reasons for buying a physical copy of the game, namely that you can put in the game disk and play right away without the game taking up large portions of your system's hard drive.

@Agriculture I know Bethesda and broken are synonyms, but Skyrim is playable on the PS3 without patches... It's just not a pleasant experience. But those are the exceptions.

AND parts of Europe too, almost everywhere except in the big cities.

All my PS4 games have patches. I don't know how unplayable they would be without patches but it's far from PS2 standard were everything worked in most games.

Do you mean eastern europe? Western europe has very good internet today.

Depends on where you live. I live in a city, but unless I can afford to pay way too much money to a cheerfully corrupt and honestly dishonest cable company my connection speed is decent but not what some would consider "high speed". (up to) 60mbps is great, but downloading a large game can still take an hour or two.

I have never been to Eastern Europe so, yes, I mean Western Europe. Everywhere except in the big cities you have slow internet speeds, like in US.

@FaeKnight 60mbps is fabulous! In the countryside we have 2-5mbps.

@Agriculture As far as I know, all my games are perfectly playable without patches. In fact, I just started playing Spider-Man a few hours ago, didn't want to wait for the patch to download and install (like I usually do), so I went in the game sans patches, and it plays like I expect a game to play.

@Yorumi 3DS boxes have holes to save plastic. We use plastic to drink water and you sell me a game with holes in the box? Manuals are another reason, good point. They used to be there but now they are a controller button map, basically. So what you get when you buy physical is an empty box with the beta version of the game and a button map. I guess that's why the only physical games I buy now are special editions that appeal to me.

I don't mind digital, but the fact that downloading can take days to finish especially on large game is very huge deterrent...

(Last time I took around 5 days to finish downloading FFXV Steam Edition)

I have 600 mbit/s and my broadband provider offers a maximum of 1200 mbit/s. Only in developing countries and parts of the united states does slow internet hinder game downloading anymore.

Hmm.....
/Australia

I use to know someone who lived in Australia, and they were always complaining about the government regulations on internet speeds and data limits. Namely that both are too slow and too low

Going back to this comment...

Have you seen the prices these days? It might be worth re-evaluating this sentiment. Here's a plot of every 2.5" SSD and 2.5" HDD at one of my local retailers

It's no longer a case of 500GB or 32GB, it's more like 2TB or 500GB. And it was never really a choice between 2TB and 32GB. Not an equivalently priced choice anyways.

I didn't mean SSD and no optical drive would happen in the PS5, but maybe the PS6. Eventually SSD will be cheaper since they have less moving parts, and card readers are already much cheaper than bluray drives, but the prices of rom-cards must decrease before it becomes standard. Portable consoles have been forced to accept flash storage and rom-cards already because they use less power, which is critical in portable devices. You have to go back all the way to 2004/2005 to find a portable console with an optical drive.

@skywake Yeah, I was actually looking for a SSD yesterday, and I was surprised they were this ''cheap''. Now the question is, should I get a 2TB SSD now, wait a couple of years, and if so, should I get an SSD or HDD for the time being... I don't need it right now, so I think I can wait.

@Agriculture
It's worth noting that when the PSP went with discs the disadvantages of a disc on a portable console still existed. It was just a combination of the capacity being so much greater than what the DS could offer and Sony, yet again, trying to push a new media format. UMDs were 0.9-1.8GB, the average DS game was <1/10th of the size.

Fast forward to the Switch where 8-16GB cartridges aren't that out of the ordinary. There is a Mini BluRay disc standard which is actually larger in size than the UMD was. Those stored 16GB. Even if someone developed a BD-XL mini disc for a portable console it'd still not have the 10x + capacity advantage optical media had more than a decade ago. And that train keeps going, eventually the same will be true for the full sized discs and I'm not talking 10+ years down the road.

@Octane
I'm a firm believer in having an SSD as your boot drive and then having HDDs for mass storage. SSDs are cheap enough and big enough that a laptop or even a gaming PC can get away with an SSD as the main OS, application and game drive. Even a 500GB SSD is pretty close to the price range that I'd class as within reach for even for a mainstream budget PC spec.

But for mass storage? HDDs are still the way to go. You don't need all your content to be fast, even BluRay rips barely need to read at 50Mbps let alone 500MB/s. So for mass storage go with a 3TB+ HDD and get a second 3TB+ HDD which you regularly back it up to. That way you get the storage, the speed and the redundancy and you are still spending less than you would have on a single 2TB SSD.

Yes, of course Sony made an analyses of benefits and disadvantages of optical media. Now the situation is different and few portable devices, including laptops have HDDs or optical drive. It basically comes down to how small circuits can be made while still being affordable and we already know it can be greatly improved, because high end CPUs show us that. It was a great choice to tell people the Switch will support 2 tb cards because they will eventually come, and even be affordable at some point in the near future.

Xbox Two and PS5 will have a SSD but will also have an optical drive. Why? Because SSD are becoming cheaper and by the time these consoles are released a reasonable capacity will be affordable for console manufacturers. Not really sure about PS5 but Xbox Two will have an optical drive because Microsoft believes in the media features, UHD BD and backwards compatibility. The streaming Xbox Two will likely skip the optical drive and have a very humble storage capacity.

@skywake I'm looking for long-term storage, both for my PC and PS4. HHD is going to fail on me some day, I just want to be prepared for that. I'm not worried yet, so I think I'll wait. 2TB is more than enough for either. I don't have a lot of films or music, so I should be fine with 1-2TB, it's mostly Word documents, and Excel sheets.