looks like 2020 for launch and 2 boxes, one shit one that streams everything and a good one. most eyes are looking at the streaming one so far, be interesting to see if they can pull it off. https://www.thurrott.com/xbox/163896/details-microsofts-xbox-scarlett-game-streaming-service#
https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/playstation-now/ https://www.xbox.com/en-AU/xbox-game-pass alternatively - https://www.origin.com/usa/en-us/store/origin-access https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/games/gamestream/ supposedly nvidia will be using this too https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/games/geforce-now/
It's definitely headed that way looking into the future. I have my doubts about the viability of this gen streaming console in Australia though. Not with the mix tech NBN that's being rolled out currently. Definitely parts of the world with giga speeds will be rather viable.. It is a constantly evolving market... so shall be interesting once google wades in.. wonder if there's going to be new joint ventures with the traditional rivals. I will stick to the traditional console when it launches via my fttn.. yay ..
Microsoft are doing a lot of work with downloadable games and using their tech to get it on your console quicker than normal. They did talk about the tech during e3. With the large download sizes and even updates. I still like a physical disc so I can actually play the same day. Or within minutes...no matter how quick of an internet connection you have.
I still love my console game collection being physical! The idea that I have to pay some sort of subscription crap just to use my console and play my games really doesn’t sit well with me. I guess I’m oldskool but I prefer the pay once and keep for ever method.
The biggest problem I see with streaming games online (netflix style) is once MS drop support for the current generation streaming console for whatever comes next, they’ll turn the old stuff off and your old streaming console will be a worthless paper weight. At least with physical media you can play your old stuff virtually forever!
Ditto, however, there are advantages and disadvantages to both. I've bought some games that were absolute stinkers. That's always a bitter pill to swallow for a full price game purchase. "Renting" games at a lower price means if you like it, keep "paying and playing". If not, no money wasted. Secondly, a game is only as good as the platform to play it on. PC gamers get a free pass there (PC as a platform isn't perfect, mind you. Pros and cons there too). But my pile of PS2 physical games is only worthwhile if my PS2 doesn't break, or I can source another console. Ditto for the other ~50 consoles I own that are beginning to deteriorate. Video games are a young industry, but we're already starting to ask questions about how we keep playing things past a window of 2-3 years post release. I think all of these questions are good, but ultimately relying on vendors doesn't work long term, and having everything physical becomes cumbersome once your games library reaches a certain size (I now have 3 entire sets of shelves, plus a few drawers full of physical games from 35 years of collecting, and no idea how to house it all). Microsoft currently are in my good books for their exceptional efforts on backwards compatibility. But it's still not perfect, and it's only one stupid middle manager away from being yanked out from underneath us (history shows us that for every good corporate decision in video games, there's always some knob who undoes it). With all that said, I also understand why DRM and restrictions on things are in place. Piracy in the short term hurts profits and means the business of game dev doesn't work. Ironically piracy in the long term is the saviour of "games as art", and the preservation our countless human-hours of effort that are video games. Lots of words to say "I dunno what the answer is". I just hope the industry gets better at this over time.
Sort of. A hell of a lot of those games require patches to fix major bugs, and once Sony inevitably drop support, you're stuck on 1.0 versions of all of them. Not a problem for every game of course (often more of a problem for multiplayer parts). But there's some notable ones that really need patching to make games work even in single player. Pretty much anything from the PS3 and XBox 360 era and newer is a serious problem for all gamers who want to play games long term, even the ones with physical copies. Fingers crossed the pirates find a way to preserve not only the games, but their final patches too. (Or, you know, Sony and Microsoft support all their games forever, but that's a longer shot than trusting the pirates). And of course, that's not even considering the substantial amount of stuff that's digital-only still.
I wanted to download outrun for ps3 a while ago (was never released on physical media). It has disappeared into oblivion after sega’s licensing deal with Ferrari had lapsed.
this is a genuine problem that not everyone takes into consideration - however the scene are very aware of this. I know myself I always used to archive patches for my PC games (I still have MANY old patches, map packs all sorts of stuff) which is near impossible if you use a Steam version (you just get what you get not a disc and then downloading individual patches). GoG are the gold standard in PC for compatibility and versioning imo for PC. However I know the scene does archive and update console releases - much to the annoyance of games publishers who would be much happier if they just died (so they can resell them - RENT THEM back to you next generation). Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo might be back into back compat (let's take some time out to remember that this is historically one of Nintendo's worst generations for back compat,Sony's too - but they have been really great at it in the past) but PC emulators have come along in leaps and bounds and as PC's scale up in horsepower above old 7th gen especially HW the job gets easier. I personally think a lot of them are too much work at the moment but they are only getting better. People look at 8/16/32 bit emulation and the like and forget that come a generation down the track a lot of games will be rustled out to pasture and the scene will just step in. Right now these people are called pirates but when the rights holders abandon everything and ppl still want to experience them they will be able to. It's a big reason why you see people actually abandon large physical collections, this is rife through the DC/OG XB/PS1-2/Saturn/GC/Wii/WiiU even generations now but it's only a matter of time until it hits seventh and 8th gen machines.
I know that's a bugbear for many, but I don't mind the charging/rental side of it. I'm unphased by ownership (I used to collect and hoard, but in recent years it's dawned on me that owning tonnes of stuff was never satisfying). My issue is more availability. I'm happy for a games rental model to exist (I don't want it to exist exclusively, but I think in and of itself it's fine) as long as the availability is there. The Netflix analogy is the one everyone keeps returning to, and for both good and bad it's a great example. A few bucks a month for a huge library you can consume as you wish, opt out of for a bit when you're over it, opt back in when you like and all your metadata is still there. All pros. Cons of course - stuff isn't there forever. And this is my problem - availability. As covered above, physical releases don't necessarily help (your physical Megadrive cartridges are useless when your Megadrive dies). I continually like to Frank Cifaldi's GDC video that talks about the differences and similarities between the games and film industry, and the separation of content and hardware. Movies of course are easier, because there's very much a set standard per generation (MPEG2 for DVD, h264 for BluRay, etc). But it always falls back on the rights holders and publishers - there's little excuse to not make your content available forever across hardware generations. Sadly it comes down to a hard separation between finance/business/legal departments and creatives (something I witness VERY closely in my current job). One half of the industry sees content as pure commodity to be bought, sold, and discarded when done. The other half sees it as art that needs to be preserved and enjoyed like any other. And never the twain shall meet. For a short while there I thought things were getting better. Nintendo dropped their "emulation is the devil" for a minute and made the Wii Virtual Console and eShop, Sony sold PS1 games on PSN, and things were looking up. Now? Wii's eShop is dead and nothing transfers at a rights/ownership level to WiiU/Switch, and Sony's head of sales Jim Ryan says about old games: "Why would anybody play this?". In both cases, half a dozen or fewer executives (old/business/lawyer types) who throw away countless millions of man hours of work and art because they don't understand it. Whether old content is sold or rented, there's a deeper problem there. Couple that with the necessary complexity of modern software (patching is an inevitability if you want enormous Triple-A games worked on by hundreds/thousands of people), and there's no satisfying answer in the current structure. The "good news" is that the pirates can't be stopped. You can't control their decentralised nature, and you can't stop digital things being copied (because it's trivial to do so, and information that is digitally represented isn't a tangible, resource-limited thing). And for what it's worth, I'm doing my part. I've preserved 6 previously unreleased games for a specific 80s home computer, verified them with MAME/MESS and will shortly submit them to archive.org. A drop in the ocean when you consider the bigger picture. But about all I have the power to do at this point, sadly.
another thing i forgot to say is that companies will tend to only preserve that which is potentially profitable, which is why even though i am not a huge fan of the xbox brand i get this feeling from phil spencer that he actually and actively cares about games. maybe that's why he's hoarding game companies like some of hoard discs and carts.
Can't speak for the xbox network, but from what I constantly experience with download speeds being significatly slower through my Playstation vs my PC, I won't be going near a streaming console anytime soon. I just had to redownload titanfall 2 and it took close to 4 days.
Reveal from E3 2.07 "- the combination of the SSD and the solid state drive..." err.... so not a tech head then.
Maybe a little late to this one, and a little off topic, PSN has always been terrible for download speeds, long ago I learned to block one particular IP at the router which fixes things. The article did talk about disabling the block when you're playing online games, but since I don't do that on the PS4 I just leave it turned on. Search for "Block Shitty PSN Server" and you will see this has been around forever. One of the first google hits: https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/01/download-ps4-games-faster-with-one-small-tweak/ But on the XBox, I'm happy not to have a disk drive if only you can still buy codes at local stores (mostly for the lower price point). I like being able to download my games and not having to stuff about with discs, I don't actually sell anything anyway so resale isn't my issues, but then I understand those people who want that. Which then leads to the next issue, you need the right download to make this viable, as above with the PSN issues that makes it far less than ideal for people with slower connections or network congestion. Steaming just makes that even more of a likely issue. What did that video reveal exactly?
