Returning to Brian Farrell’s quote that there would be “no physical goods cost for game makers,” he seems to have neglected the consumer in this. First there are those who have no Internet connection direct to their console – how would these people consume games if there was no physical format to purchase? And even if we were to ignore this issue, he has neglected to mention the physical cost would likely be shifted onto the consumer. Excluding the Wii, this generation of consoles has seen an explosion in games requiring mandatory installs, ranging from anywhere from 1GB up to and over 5GB. Add to this demo downloads, as well as using the console’s hard drive to store music, videos, and other software, and it all adds up to a full hard drive. Presumably future generation of consoles will have larger hard drives, but they would have to be of Godzilla-like proportions to handle full game digital downloads. This would ultimately see gamers having to fork out for external hard drives in order to store purchased games, rather than go through the timely nightmare of having to re-download them.
Of course, there are other aspects when discussing downloads of this size, namely how many games you would be downloading, and how frequently, a question that is further complicated by how much a gamer uses the online multiplayer. Gaming is a global business, but the quality, quantity and price of Internet providers changes drastically from country to the next. As Kaz Hirai, newly appointed President and Chief Executive Office of Sony, stated last year, “We do business in parts of the world where network infrastructure isn’t as robust as one would hope. There’s always going to be requirement for a business of our size and scope to have a physical medium. To think everything will be downloaded in two years, three years or even 10 years from now is taking it a little bit to the extreme.”
Hirai’s native Japan was rated first in a 2008 study conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-ordination and Development (OECD) into advertised download speeds, in countries where more than 50% of the ISP plans had caps imposed upon them. Out of 34 countries that the OECD studied, four were found to have caps imposed by all the ISPs on all of their price plans, including Australia. However, these capped plans seem reasonable when compared to those of neighbouring New Zealand, which this article in Maximum PC described as “draconian.”
As if that was not enough to contend with, global broadband consumption is growing at an exponential rate, with traffic estimated to increase 50% per year up to 2015 on fixed networks. Their figures show that in 2010, the world used 9.665 petabytes per month. In 2015, three years from now, that is expected to jump to 116,539 petabytes per month. Remember, Steam provided 780 petabytes to 40 million users in an entire year.
Simply put, the broadband networks across the globe will be pushed to their limits, and possibly beyond, which has led to a host of companies trying to reduce usage through caps or deals with customers. Professional Service Network Deloitte has predicted that 2012 will bring about the end of unlimited Internet usage, stating that “a growth in streaming video, social networks, torrents, cloud services and gaming have thrown a tidal wave of demand at ISPs’ networks.”
All of these facts and figures make for pretty grim reading, not only for those who hoped for a digital-only console in the future, but even for the current generation of gaming, as gamers will be expected to pay a premium for digital downloads, extra downloadable content, and online multiplayer.
However, just because games will grow in size, does not mean that the delivery file will have to. Movie-streaming service Netflix has started using a codec from EyeIO to cut down on the bandwidth required to watch their products. As technology grows and bandwidth levels reach a critical breaking point, it would be reasonable to assume that a necessity for better compression codecs for large files, such as films and games, will boost development in this area, especially if it is advocated or undertaken by the same companies who will be selling us their product. Gaming companies may also contribute towards the development of better broadband networks, as unlimited Internet access can only equate to more money for them.
Given all this information, it would seem that, at least for the immediate future, Kaz Hirai will prove to be right, and that the next generation of consoles and games will hopefully appreciate the limits being laid down on consumer’s Internet usage. However, in ten years, if a discless console were to emerge in a world when we all have jetpacks, robot housemaids, 8K resolution TVs and limitless Internet access, game sizes may no longer be restricted to a solid state medium such as Blu-ray. Perhaps one day, in a digital download market, the only restriction on a game will be the depths of the developers’ imaginations.
