NEXT GEN DISC-LESS ?


There are rumours circulating that the next Xbox will be disc-less and therefore support no optical media at all. Though this is inevitably a step into the future of digital media, one that has already been taken in PC gaming, music, mobile phone software and now more and more people are moving on to streaming films and/or TV. Is it time for the next-gen of games consoles to take this step too?

As far as the current generation goes, you can download games through Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network and the Wii's Virtual Console. Furthermore, on Xbox 360 & PSN you can buy and download full retail games direct from their respective marketplaces which are then downloaded to your hard drive where they will belong.

This alone raises issues for the next generation and whether they will be backwards compatible. One always hopes the next generation consoles will be able to play their games they own for that previous generation. The reason being that gamers won't have to keep every piece of previous hardware, accessories and such in order to play those games and also the chance they may be enhanced on the more powerful next-gen hardware. However, if you've downloaded a full game direct through Xbox or PSN, one would hope they could download it again on the next-gen otherwise it's locked and stuck on that generation of hardware and if you ever wanted to play that/those downloaded games again you'll have to use that console again in order to do so. Then again, if the next-gen is disc-less and one can re-download those games their purchased through their respective stores, what about those who chose to buy it at retail? They still own the game, just in a different medium - will they be able to play those games on a disc-less machine?

Looking at current platforms for downloading, PC is doing extremely well and taking Steam for example, which on 5th Jan 2012, hit 5 million active users online. However, looking back at the PSP Go which failed miserably, could this have been due to it being direct download only or hardware, marketing or price related reasons?

Quite a big problem for me and no doubt many others are bandwidth limits. I have a 60gb download cap per month and although I could pay more to increase that, in my financial situation and at my current download rate it's fine. I download PC games on Steam but only maybe once or twice a month at the most and then they're a couple of gig and not too hefty. Taking a look at some current-gen games, particularly those on PS3, some are reaching to limits of their blu-ray capacity which would be my entire month's allowance in one swoop. Now this could lift the lid on Internet Service Providers, who may have to give in and allow a larger cap as more and more people demand it. Though what will the limits be to those games? At first Microsoft have a size limit to their Arcade games so that they would fit on the original memory cards, though after not so long the cap was removed and we've had some spectacular XBLA games. Would developers feel they need to cut down their overall size or push for much better textures and high quality audio and even movies which will ramp up the mbs even more.

More to come...

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