Don’t expect Sony to offer its full PS3 game catalog for download over the Playstation Network any time soon.
In an interview with IGN, Sony’s senior vice president of marketing and head of the Playstation Network, Peter Dille, deflated hopes for a wide selection of large scale downloadable PS3 games. He said the company is evangelizing game downloads in general with smaller releases, but “the notion of getting all your games digitally, I just don’t see it happening,” he said.
Part of the reason is, ironically, Blu-ray. The format allows Playstation 3 games to be considerably larger in size compared to DVD-format Xbox 360 discs. Unfortunately, Blu-ray’s 50 GB of headroom makes it harder to deliver a game over the Internet. “Maybe this point will come at some time, but today to download 50 gigs of data before you play a game, you could probably go buy a car, bring it home, put your family into it, drive to the store, buy and bring the game home by the time you [could download it],” Dille said.
Dille also alluded to pressure from retail stores to keep them in the loop. Sony is “working very hard to make sure we do this thoughtfully so that retail has a part to participate in the ecosystem with us,” Dille said. This is telling, because Sony appeared to be challenging retailers last year with the PSP Go, a handheld gaming device that has no optical drive and gets all its games over the Playstation Network. PSP sales as a whole plummeted last year, so clearly the PSP Go hasn’t taken off. Perhaps Sony has realized turning its back on retail stores isn’t wise.
Still, Microsoft is building its own online storefront for full retail Xbox 360 games. The storefront doesn’t have the newest titles out there, but games like Mass Effect and Bioshock are popular, and selling them to gamers before a big sequel comes along is bound to make retail stores happy, because they’re likely to score a sale as a result.
It’s too bad that Sony’s dropping the ball on digital downloads, but having sat through excruciatingly long updates and installs for new PS3 games, I can understand that offering entire games for download poses a technical challenge.
17 Comments
Nevertheless, perhaps they could obtain a BITS license from Microsoft and patiently download entire games.
Just another retarded business idea from the idiots at Sony... KEEP 'EM COMING GUYS!!! YOU'LL BE GOING UNDER SOON!!
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Originally Posted by Mr. Belvedere
Duh, 50GB per game. Unless they use some awesome Torrent like technology, a 1:1 connection to download 50GB is gonna take a while.
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Games are generally larger because the game has heaps of textures, video, audio & speech content .... that's what takes up all the space.. the game engines are tiny compared to the content.
In essence, they're ripping Sony up about having games with beautiful textures, accompanying music, and cutscenes, and complaining that they can't download these great quality games because they're too good.
Damned if you do, Damned if you don't.
Wake up to yourselves people!
Personally I say Kudo's to Sony for stepping up to the challenge of improving the status Quo of the gaming world, compared to M$ which is completely uninspirational, and using ho-hum existing technology to produce mediocre games with heavily compressed textures, low quality Audio and Cutscenes.
I don't buy many games, but the PS3 games I have are gorgeous.
To keep the masses happy, perhaps sony should encourage production of mini-games, like apple ipod games, for the PS3. Yay! J/k
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Originally Posted by debro
To keep the masses happy, perhaps sony should encourage production of mini-games, like apple ipod games, for the PS3. Yay! J/k
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Originally Posted by slayerking
They already do and suprise they are called Mini's
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This entire article is FUD.
Slow news day?
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Originally Posted by debro
Sooo ... everyones ripping off Sony, because the PS3 games are too big to download ....
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I don't see any way out of this other then just providing the games and making warnings all over about how slow it will be. Then its the users choice.
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Originally Posted by glamdring92
Maybe sony should start working on a data base of textures and what not. Sure new games will have more but every time you install a new game it can be added into the data base on your PS3. Because how often do game providers reuse textures in all there games. A lot...
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Originally Posted by glamdring92
But then again last i knew PS3 didn't have a detachable HDD so you can get a bigger one if yours is to small.....
I don't see any way out of this other then just providing the games and making warnings all over about how slow it will be. Then its the users choice. |
At any rate, if you've managed to fill your PS3 HDD with crud, you can move it to a (FAT32 formatted) USB HDD or USB Memory Stick attached to any of the USB ports
But, changing the PS3 HDD is easier than installing a PC HDD
As for the downloadable games, who cares? On one hand, even with a massive Sony seedbox and a healthy swarm, it's still going to take over 24 hours to download 50GB on a 7-10M cable modem. On the other hand, our PS3 spends more time running CDFreaks Folding@Home Team 13505 than anything else so we probably wouldn't mind waiting for the convenience. On the gripping hand, maybe Sony figures that the average geekasaurus will still pre-order a game for the discount and "special" in game bonuses, emerge from basement hibernation, get Mom to drive him to Gamestop, and actually interact with at least two humans: Mom and the Gamestop salesperson.
SCEA: looking out for the psychological well being of the American Geekazoid Gamer since 1994.
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Originally Posted by Icy Mt.
Good one, Debro! We've never needed to connect a USB hard drive to our 80GB PS3 for anything more than a backup. We've even got 10GB partitioned off so we can run Yellowdog Linux. With the streaming capabilities, why would you store anything other than the OS and gamesaves on the HDD?
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I have a tendency *not* to take the rubbish out too often, same with my PS3 ... I forget to clean old files out .... and 320GB HDD's weren't too expensive anyway - and it *feels* faster than the 40GB HDD that was in it before, of course, that could just be bias in a unconscious attempt to justify the nerdiness of the decision to upgrade the PS3's HDD
Buy the game if you like it!!
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