5 ms·

A 1TB SSD drive costs around 100 (€/ $). A person who enjoys tweaking their PC likely can easily get terabytes of storage space. I don't really see the utility

by fsloth 6y ago

A 1TB SSD drive costs around 100 (€/ $). A person who enjoys tweaking their PC likely can easily get terabytes of storage space. I don't really see the utility of fiddling with 10GB here and there...

Aerroon 6y ago
I wonder if it would be possible to get 250 GB SSDs for like $25 or less. You could then literally sell your game on an SSD. According to this [0] Nintendo charges $8-20 per cartridge to third parties.
- audunw 6y ago
  Yeah, this is basically exactly what Nintendo is doing. I guess for PC and larger consoles you could use larger memory cards that might be cheaper to make. But anyway, it's still a problematic approach since it eats into the margins unless you increase the price of the game, which most game publishers try to avoid. I really like Nintendo Switch cartridges, I prefer to buy physical copies when I can, but I don't think there's a future in them. I kind of wish someone would make "smart cards" that just gives you access to the game online. Since there's so many essential updates to games these days, that's almost what cartridges are anyway. You forgot the reference link btw.
- fsloth 6y ago
  Given the popularity of digital sales it's hard to see the business model where this would make sense. I have a bog standard internet connection with a download speed of 1000gb. Most games download faster than it would take me to go to the store or order a package.
- voltagex_ 6y ago
  Yes, https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000266629080.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000266629080.html - guessing that the AliExpress price is 2x the Taobao price which is ?x the quantity price. I do wonder how fast the controller/flash in this is, though (this is limited to SATA3) - that's now many times slower than the Series X / PS5 speed.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  > "...literally sell your game on an SSD..." That would be terrible from an archival perspective. Flash memory is subject to charge leakage that causes data be lost over time. High density flash, which has the lowest cost per byte, also has the poorest data retention lifetime.
girvo 6y ago
A 1TB NVMe isn’t that cheap (though it’s getting there) yet, though. I’ll never go back to actual drives now I’m running 2x NVMe’s haha
rerx 6y ago
Not everybody has gigabit FTTH. On a 25 Mbit connection waiting for humongous downloads really sucked when I wanted to play a bit of GTA 5 (not even online!) after not touching it for a few weeks.
BatteryMountain 6y ago
Okay, imagine you have 300+ games on Steam/Epic/Gog etc... if you were to install 50 of them, that alone would eat up 1TB easy peasy. If you want to install more of them, a 1TB nvme drive is not going to cut it. Maybe 10TB either. So what do most people do? They install/uninstall frequently. But for those with crappy internet where 30GB take 2 days to download, it's better to make a backup before uninstall/reinstall. If the backups are smaller, that helps too. So yes, 10GB here and there isn't much.. but as a collective, if you have 1000000 users downloading 300GB less per month (I know, silly numbers, it's way more in reality), it would make a huge difference to the "gaming industries & network load"-effects as a whole. Plug-in some real numbers (which I don't have)(Players X ave number games downloaded per year X ave game size). Other industries like streaming/music sites, they optimize their transmission sizes and even small gains are often worth it (10 million people downloading 2MB less per song on spotify, while playing 50 songs per day... the numbers add up quick). Somebody will pay for the transmission - either the consumer or the business. The business only needs to ask is it cheaper to pay a few devs to optimize their code or is cheaper to pay for a fatter data pipe. I think long term, engineering effort always wins vs throwing money at the problem.
- fsloth 6y ago
  I don't have any stats so I don't know how large is this population who want to rotate through their Steam library with high cadence who lack fast internet. About the lack of fast internet - It feels like streaming and remote work have normalized "fast enough" internet connections of 100mb and up but I might be completely wrong here.

by fsloth 6y ago

Aerroon 6y ago

I wonder if it would be possible to get 250 GB SSDs for like $25 or less. You could then literally sell your game on an SSD. According to this [0] Nintendo charges $8-20 per cartridge to third parties.

audunw 6y ago
Yeah, this is basically exactly what Nintendo is doing. I guess for PC and larger consoles you could use larger memory cards that might be cheaper to make. But anyway, it's still a problematic approach since it eats into the margins unless you increase the price of the game, which most game publishers try to avoid. I really like Nintendo Switch cartridges, I prefer to buy physical copies when I can, but I don't think there's a future in them. I kind of wish someone would make "smart cards" that just gives you access to the game online. Since there's so many essential updates to games these days, that's almost what cartridges are anyway. You forgot the reference link btw.
fsloth 6y ago
Given the popularity of digital sales it's hard to see the business model where this would make sense. I have a bog standard internet connection with a download speed of 1000gb. Most games download faster than it would take me to go to the store or order a package.
voltagex_ 6y ago
Yes, https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000266629080.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000266629080.html - guessing that the AliExpress price is 2x the Taobao price which is ?x the quantity price. I do wonder how fast the controller/flash in this is, though (this is limited to SATA3) - that's now many times slower than the Series X / PS5 speed.
ThrowawayR2 6y ago
> "...literally sell your game on an SSD..." That would be terrible from an archival perspective. Flash memory is subject to charge leakage that causes data be lost over time. High density flash, which has the lowest cost per byte, also has the poorest data retention lifetime.

girvo 6y ago

A 1TB NVMe isn’t that cheap (though it’s getting there) yet, though. I’ll never go back to actual drives now I’m running 2x NVMe’s haha

rerx 6y ago

Not everybody has gigabit FTTH. On a 25 Mbit connection waiting for humongous downloads really sucked when I wanted to play a bit of GTA 5 (not even online!) after not touching it for a few weeks.

BatteryMountain 6y ago

Okay, imagine you have 300+ games on Steam/Epic/Gog etc... if you were to install 50 of them, that alone would eat up 1TB easy peasy. If you want to install more of them, a 1TB nvme drive is not going to cut it. Maybe 10TB either. So what do most people do? They install/uninstall frequently. But for those with crappy internet where 30GB take 2 days to download, it's better to make a backup before uninstall/reinstall. If the backups are smaller, that helps too. So yes, 10GB here and there isn't much.. but as a collective, if you have 1000000 users downloading 300GB less per month (I know, silly numbers, it's way more in reality), it would make a huge difference to the "gaming industries & network load"-effects as a whole. Plug-in some real numbers (which I don't have)(Players X ave number games downloaded per year X ave game size). Other industries like streaming/music sites, they optimize their transmission sizes and even small gains are often worth it (10 million people downloading 2MB less per song on spotify, while playing 50 songs per day... the numbers add up quick). Somebody will pay for the transmission - either the consumer or the business. The business only needs to ask is it cheaper to pay a few devs to optimize their code or is cheaper to pay for a fatter data pipe. I think long term, engineering effort always wins vs throwing money at the problem.

fsloth 6y ago
I don't have any stats so I don't know how large is this population who want to rotate through their Steam library with high cadence who lack fast internet. About the lack of fast internet - It feels like streaming and remote work have normalized "fast enough" internet connections of 100mb and up but I might be completely wrong here.