At these sizes I’m starting to think that game devs should just go back to physical storage.
If I’m going to have to store 100 + GB, then the storage space is now a meaningful contributor to the cost of the game. It looks like quad-layer Bluray disks can store 128 GB. I’m not sure what the cost to produce them is, but I’d be curious if it’s worse than the cost players have to pay in buying more storage space for these giant games.
At 16x, you will get 72MB/s read speed. My SSD has a 560MB/s read speed. Because of this discrepancy, loading a game from a blu-ray disc will take roughly 7.7 times longer. A 20 second loading screen becomes a 2.5 minute loading screen. This alone justifies the cost of keeping it on my SSD. Especially because if I want to remove it I don’t lose permanent access to the game, I can download it again in a couple hours.
And m.2 drives at gen four are at like 7000MB/s for reads. And those drives have gotten significantly cheaper over the last half year or so. Gen 5 hits speeds of like 12000MB/s
I got a 2tb gen 4 for 100 recently so my computer now has 3tb of m.2 drives for total of 170 euros spent.
PCIe gen 5 speeds are double PCIe gen 4 speeds, for the same number of lanes of course. Whether a hard drive is capable of those speeds is another story (although my current drive pushes the limits of gen 4). I’m not sure what the fastest PCIe gen 5 hard drive on the market is right now, but eventually we will start to approach the limits of gen 5 and start looking at gen 6 drives, at least at this rate.
Consoles still have physical storage as an option, at least partially.
For PC: the vast majority of PCs don’t have a blu ray drive. So that’s a $50-100 expense. Or a 1 TB SSD is under $100. Going with physical media makes no sense here, even ignoring the other glaring problems, like game updates and loading times.
Cost of production of a blu ray disc will be cheap. Packaging and shipping it slightly less cheap. Dealing with a retail store exceptionally less cheap. A digital copy sold will see >95% of revenue kept (first party sales — some amount lost to transaction fees), or ~70% kept (sold on third party digital platforms). A physical sale will see closer to 50%. It’s a huge difference.
As far as I know, the Xbox One and PS4 started the trend of reading nothing from the disc after install. The disc just acts as instalation media and a physical authenticator.
At these sizes I’m starting to think that game devs should just go back to physical storage.
If I’m going to have to store 100 + GB, then the storage space is now a meaningful contributor to the cost of the game. It looks like quad-layer Bluray disks can store 128 GB. I’m not sure what the cost to produce them is, but I’d be curious if it’s worse than the cost players have to pay in buying more storage space for these giant games.
At 16x, you will get 72MB/s read speed. My SSD has a 560MB/s read speed. Because of this discrepancy, loading a game from a blu-ray disc will take roughly 7.7 times longer. A 20 second loading screen becomes a 2.5 minute loading screen. This alone justifies the cost of keeping it on my SSD. Especially because if I want to remove it I don’t lose permanent access to the game, I can download it again in a couple hours.
And m.2 drives at gen four are at like 7000MB/s for reads. And those drives have gotten significantly cheaper over the last half year or so. Gen 5 hits speeds of like 12000MB/s
I got a 2tb gen 4 for 100 recently so my computer now has 3tb of m.2 drives for total of 170 euros spent.
PCIe gen 5 speeds are double PCIe gen 4 speeds, for the same number of lanes of course. Whether a hard drive is capable of those speeds is another story (although my current drive pushes the limits of gen 4). I’m not sure what the fastest PCIe gen 5 hard drive on the market is right now, but eventually we will start to approach the limits of gen 5 and start looking at gen 6 drives, at least at this rate.
Consoles still have physical storage as an option, at least partially.
For PC: the vast majority of PCs don’t have a blu ray drive. So that’s a $50-100 expense. Or a 1 TB SSD is under $100. Going with physical media makes no sense here, even ignoring the other glaring problems, like game updates and loading times.
Cost of production of a blu ray disc will be cheap. Packaging and shipping it slightly less cheap. Dealing with a retail store exceptionally less cheap. A digital copy sold will see >95% of revenue kept (first party sales — some amount lost to transaction fees), or ~70% kept (sold on third party digital platforms). A physical sale will see closer to 50%. It’s a huge difference.
As far as I know, the Xbox One and PS4 started the trend of reading nothing from the disc after install. The disc just acts as instalation media and a physical authenticator.