HardlyOriginally Posted by Bojay1997
For starters, you completely ignored the fact that a lot of user's are already close to their ISP cap's each month as video streaming grows. And the PC user base for large AAA games is far smaller than the console world and most are downloading large game's at a significantly slower rate. And it's extremely rare to have a PC release sell to a large percentage of your user's so digital sales are more spread out and consistent where as on console's they have to deal with several instances like Halo 4 each year where a game rolls out that quickly sells to an extremely large percentage of your install base. That's something the PC gaming world (The higher end at least versus the more casual heart of it these days) probably hasn't seen since things like Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 rolled out a decade ago.
The strain it's placing on internet infrastructure is far smaller than that what full digital console distribution would place and most of it can be done even with severe ISP capacity constraints. And several major ISP's have actually placed caps for the first time or lowered them in recent years which is also another factor. User's are going backwards with capacity rather than forwards in regards to their internet connection and any hopes that the trend will reverse and take significant steps in the other direction are just hopes that remain to be seen will happen in the near future.
Also, an awful lot of Steam sales and such are small casual titles and older titles that tend to be smaller in size. The ESA survey a year or two ago showed that the percentage of digital sales against physical sales was significantly higher for dollar's than it was by gigabytes distributed. That means that the percentage of those large high value projects reaching PC gamer's via optical disc are significantly higher than the amount of sales by digital and retail. Digital's dominance on things like Skyrim (Assuming that saw an optical disc release...something I can't swear on since I bought the 360 release) isn't nearly at the same level as it is on the smaller more casual products that are increasingly growing more popular on PC's than things like that use to dominate like FPS's, flight simulator's, and RTS games. The stuff more applicable to the console world on PC's still have a large amount of retail sales presence even at this late date.
No matter the debate about how prepared ISP's are right now for this, the fact is that they're not there yet and optical disc are secure for this generation. And I simply don't see optical disc going from likely being on a even footing one generation with digital to being nonexistent the next. Not only do we have the question on just how much progress will take place with internet infrastructure over the next five year's, they also have consumer's and retailer's to deal with.
Both of which are extremely important factor's to consider. Both need to be weened off how things have been gone the past almost 40 years and I see it as highly unlikely that they're essentially going to flip a switch. And such things been predicted before in more limited terms... for instance, several user's here proclaimed that UMD was dead because of the Go and that suddenly they weren't going to be releasing new PSP software on UMD to sell to the 60 million or so UMD equipped PSP's that were out there at the time.
We even had one DP nut that argued on and on about how the PSP Go was a new platform and since console/handheld manufacturer's often don't support the previous generation with new hardware, that something like the Super Nintendo not playing Nintendo cartridges was proof positive that Sony could move onwards with the Go without ever releasing any more software via UMD to cater to the many millions of PSP user's out there that were largely buying their games via UMD.
These companies want to make money. And that seems to point towards increasingly going digital. But they're not so stuck on killing retail releases as quickly as possible that they'd be willing to leave a significant amount of money on the table by doing it prematurely like this nutty DP user thought Sony would do several years ago with the PSP.
Like I said, they want to make money. And for at least a good while longer, that means also releasing your product on optical disc to be sold at retail.
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