Will the PS3's Blu-ray advantage continue?

[Jabjabs]

[Jellyfish]

1.5 TB HDD cost ≈ $250 you can "easily" drop one "into" either the PS3 or Xbox 360. Some clever tinkering can get multiple ones into come up as a single HDD

[dazza826]

the problem with this is 3 fold

1. who owns the digital download, licensing issues, for example can you play it on more than one console or is it hard locked in to the particular console,

As you paid for ownership can you sell this much like you can pre-owned games, like for example your account of games (I seem to remember that people arent allowed to sell steam accounts and the like even though they have payed for ownership of the games

2. Generally the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) Of hard drives is 3-5 years where as optical equipment will last longer if stored correctly. Its not to say that a HDD will only last that long, but for long term ownership, its not viable to store on a HDD

3. The feeling of ownership is less with a digital distribution rather than a HDD, you dont have something to show for your money besides bits and bytes, I dunno I may be old fashioned but theres that feeling of unwrapping that pysical product, and actually showing off your collection

and of course with ISP costs and speeds being crap in OZ compared to the rest of the world I agree with others when im in no hurry to see this come round

[dazza826]

forgot one thing would digital distribution still be region restrictive, like I cant have this file here cuz its banned, or not avaiable for release till another 4 months...

because I think its rude that you should have to pay more than another country because all those extra costs are cut out (ie distributors etc)

[Buttmouth]

^ It's important to realise that Digital Distribution has been available for a really long time now - music, games, movies etc are all readily available as digital downloads.

[too lazy to actually answer your questions...]
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[Lord Haart]

There's another factor pushing installs, which is the amount of data in games is growing WAAAAY faster than the read (let alone write) speed of disc media. While streaming from DVD may work for some games, it's one of the biggest challenges in gaming tech, and the presence of a hard drive helps immensely. If a 500GB game ever comes out, it will take dozens of minutes to load from disc, seek time will suck, and it will be incredibly expensive. By comparison, hard drives are many, many times faster, store more for cheaper, and can contain multiple applications.

Not sure if this will affect DD vs Bluray, since larger downloads also imply that the disc version will take eons to install, but I think it does show that mechanical readers just won't cut it for the gaming of tomorrow. Even hard drives will be obsolete fairly soon (I'd say within 20 years they'll be dying out).