Microsoft's Gaming CEO Says Xbox Won't Go All-Digital Just Yet (pcmag.com) 78
It's no surprise that the broader tech industry has largely moved away from physical disks to digital subscription-based models. But Microsoft's Gaming CEO Phil Spencer says Xbox isn't trying to do away with disks just yet -- even though making disk slots could become challenging in the future. From a report: "Our strategy does not hinge on people moving all-digital," Spencer said in a recent interview with Game File. "Getting rid of physical, that's not a strategic thing for us." While Spencer implied that disk slots have become somewhat old-school at this point, Xbox consoles will continue to offer both disk-compatible and diskless options if gamers still want to choose. Xbox hasn't confirmed yet whether the previously leaked diskless Xbox refresh of the Series X console is still coming, though.
"Gaming consoles themselves have kind of become the last consumer electronic device that has a drive," Spencer conceded, calling it a "real issue." Because so few manufacturers are still making physical disk slots, it's possible making consoles with them could become cost prohibitive in the future. "When you think about cogs that we're going to go put in a console -- and as you have fewer suppliers and fewer buyers -- the cost of the drive does have an impact," Spencer said.
"Gaming consoles themselves have kind of become the last consumer electronic device that has a drive," Spencer conceded, calling it a "real issue." Because so few manufacturers are still making physical disk slots, it's possible making consoles with them could become cost prohibitive in the future. "When you think about cogs that we're going to go put in a console -- and as you have fewer suppliers and fewer buyers -- the cost of the drive does have an impact," Spencer said.
The real test (Score:3)
Re:The real test (Score:5, Interesting)
Discs have been stubs since the PS3/Xbox360 era
Every disc game I have for my PS4 the game on the disc is a far cry from what I actually would "want" to play if there were no updates.
Perfect case in point I have a launch disc version of Cyberpunk (because I was gullible), the version I "own" is pretty terrible and unplayable. The version with updates is actually pretty fantastic. If I didn't have internet or update servers what I own is basically a coaster.
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Every disc game I have for my PS4 the game on the disc is a far cry from what I actually would "want" to play if there were no updates.
In other news, Gamers raging on the uselessness of discs because they reward developers shipping an incomplete and untested product. Film at eleven.
Perfect case in point I have a launch disc version of Cyberpunk (because I was gullible), the version I "own" is pretty terrible and unplayable. The version with updates is actually pretty fantastic. If I didn't have internet or update servers what I own is basically a coaster.
I'm sorry, I've misspoke. For the record, the correct headline was: Gamers raging on the uselessness of discs because they reward and demand that developers ship an incomplete and untested product. Film at eleven. On behalf of the studio, Our most sincere apologies for the mistake.
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You sound like the kinda folk who go to parties and talk about how you don't own a TV.
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If I didn't have internet or update servers what I own is basically a coaster.
No, it is better than nothing. Perhaps you should avoid buying games that are buggy as shit on day 1 and need a zillion patches to be enjoyable. Also, some of us actually enjoy playing single-player games and don't care about battling with 10-year-old strangers.
In the old days, PC games had copy protection on the CDs, but patches could be freely downloaded and archived forever. That would be a nice compromise for consoles, but of course nobody can be reasonable in this industry.
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avoid buying games that are buggy as shit on day 1
I guess you don't know how to read because I already admitted to falling for that in my goddamned post but you couldn't just wait for the chance to smugly pontificate could you?
Also where have you been? Even single players need day 1 patches, games like Cyberpunk which doesn't even have a multiplayer mode if you actually knew anything before popping off. BG3 needed a big day one, most games do, they're complicated and devs are under pressure to release. Unfortunate but it's reality. Also not just bugs b
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you want a PC - the platform these live service games are at home on. Most of the games I have don't need patched.
I agree but PC games are the most notorious for constant matching and that's kinda part of the sell though? THe constant stream of updates as well as things like mod support and it's a non issue as physical media for PC games has been dead for like 15 years, i can't even remember the last physical PC game i purchased, ironically it may been The Orange Box which also popularized Steam as a service.
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The day one patches make a joke out of the whole thing. At least first-party titles on Nintendo hardware seem to be mostly functional. I like platformers more and not FPS, though.
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At least first-party titles on Nintendo hardware seem to be mostly functional.
ACNH shipped in what could be considered an unfinished state, probably due to factors resulting from the Covid pandemic. Sure, it's likely not full of game-breaking bugs, but it's missing so many aspects of gameplay which were added in later updates.
Heck, my partner recently decided to check out Palworld to see what all the hype is about and he asked me if the "unfinished game" disclaimer that pops up when you launch it is anything to worry about. I told him "Nope, that's pretty much standard industry pra
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Have you seen x-box's quality control? The drives in the OG xbox, and 360 are absolute garbage and scratch the discs up.
What Microsoft should be doing is what Nintendo did, and put a "sd card" type of media slot on the digital-only models so that there is still a possibility of having physical media. I'm sure a 256GB flash chip is more expensive than an optical disc that holds 1/10th as much, but the problem has always been that downloading the game takes forever, even on fiber internet. If I have 1Gbit fib
Re: The real test (Score:1)
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Is a decade later when the servers shutdown the discs still work offline
You don't have to wait a decade for this. It's an even simpler test: Will there be a single player game released for the Xbox++, on optical media, such that I can purchase an Xbox++ and that game, and play that game without ever connecting to the internet?
Now, yes, the majority of games released today require internet connectivity so that they can enable that sweet, sweet "recurrent user spending". I get it. However, the disc drive is basically irrelevant if there won't be any offline-playable content.
We do
Capped Internet vs. no Internet (Score:2)
Will there be a single player game released for the Xbox++, on optical media, such that I can purchase an Xbox++ and that game, and play that game without ever connecting to the internet?
[...]
we can safely assume that the discs are essentially 'purchase receipts' and the games will still be 'digital downloads' for all practical purchases.
There are a couple degrees of that, and a particular user's experience will depend on exactly how inconvenient Internet access would be for that user. The case of people living in rural areas where all Internet access providers impose harsh caps differs greatly from that of people with no Internet at all for extended periods. Consider a 25 GB game with maybe a 1 GB day-one patch. The rural Internet user saves the cost of downloading the whole game over a cellular or geostationary satellite link at $5 to $10
WTF (Score:2)
"Because so few manufacturers are still making physical disk slots"
WTF does that even mean? It's a slot.
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It means he has a 'disk' and when he wants to use it he looks at his xbox and it has a 'slot' in it that he puts it in. So that's what he calls them, and clearly someone must make them. ;)
Seriously though, a more accurate term for 'slot' would be 'slot loading optical media drive'. It's not entirely ridiculous to shorthand that down to 'slot'.
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He means both the slot and the device behind it, aren’t usually considered “standard” equipment anymore. Not a surprising stance considering he’s in manufacturing and watched the PC make that slot extinct.
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WTF does that even mean? It's a slot.
You know those people who call the desktop or tower portion of their PC a "CPU" or "hard drive"? Yeah, it's like that. Some people can't be bothered to learn the proper nomenclature, or they're using the wrong terminology on purpose to troll the pedants.
Ah.. (Score:5, Funny)
Xbox Won't Go All-Digital Just Yet
Nothing quite matches the warmth of a good old analog video game.
I wasn't even aware that any video game platform for the last 40 years or so supported any non-digital games.
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Because so few manufacturers are still making physical disk slots
That's what happens when you have an idiot interviewing a moron.
Re:Ah.. (Score:5, Funny)
Speak for yourself, I do all my gaming on vinyl.
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Xbox Won't Go All-Digital Just Yet
Nothing quite matches the warmth of a good old analog video game.
I wasn't even aware that any video game platform for the last 40 years or so supported any non-digital games.
Hmm, is this an example of MBA grads not knowing what digital means? All digital storage (and compute and network) technologies are based on analog signals. This includes DVDs, HDDs, SSDs and other forms of flash, ROMs, etc. Even if the storage is remote and the game arrives over the network, it's still analog signals interpreted as digital.
Origin of "digital" (Score:2)
I've traced the term "digital" to refer to paid downloads to a term used in the U.S. copyright statute since the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act of 1995. The term "digital phonorecord delivery" is defined in 17 USC 115 [cornell.edu] to refer to a phonorecord created as the result of a digital transmission. (A "phonorecord" is a physical embodiment of a sound recording, analogous to a "copy" of a work in any other medium.) One common scenario involving a "digital phonorecord delivery" is buying a track o
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If they want to save on costs by not including an optical drive, why not sell games on USB sticks? It's basically how every console worked until the PS1 - just a different form factor on the cartridge.
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Yeah, the title really makes one doubt the rest of the article.
There's the 1983 Dragon's Lair based on an LD that was analog ;)
It's time for us to go to war with Digital Only. (Score:4, Insightful)
While I consider myself a digital native, the idea of a digital only future for media is terrifying. Whether it be games, movies, music, or other. We should not allow our digital overlords to take physical away. It takes away so many rights we as consumers should have (backups, resale, etc).
It also makes a world in which these machines and tech will die once the manufacturer gets bored with the platform. At least with physical products and media, they can be hacked and returned to life by the community.
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I dunno, i think it would be kind of cool to allow companies to completely control the narrative of their work forever and ever.
Like take the movie "stand by me"; the ENTIRE cast is white. what about diverse audiences? What about differently abled people? Clearly the movie is completely out of date given societal standards and mores circa 2024.
By having everything digital only, it would allow the producers to update movies and media to better fit modern audiences. And it would prevent the fringe-MAGA types
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Nice troll post. I'm sure someone will bite but you kind of went a little to over the top. 5/10.
Re:It's time for us to go to war with Digital Only (Score:4, Insightful)
It's gonna take an act of legislation saying that media owners have to provide up to date and DRM free download of these types of things to customer who paid.
Ironically the music business of people already have this, it's pretty simple to purchase a album of music in AAC/MP3/FLAC format and have that digital copy forever. The same cannot be said for movies almost at all and games it's a half and half with places like GOG and Humble Bundle offering DRM free purchases but the big dog is Steam who does not but nobody is worried about that since steam has been around for like 20 years with no issues.
If the answer to "digital only is a problem" is "physical media" unfortunately I would say that is an ultimately losing battle. The public likes digital only, they like streaming services, people love Spotify and Steam and other things. We can complain that they shouldn't but the vast majority of people are not concerned with the principles of the matter, they just want what they want in the most convenient form.
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Too be fair, there's a few Good Old Games on gog.com that
should be played with (unofficial) patch sets--downloaded from other sites!
The official patches didn't fix *enough* bugs.
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nobody is worried about that since steam has been around for like 20 years with no issues.
Steam has plenty of issues. People complain every time Valve decide to shut out first XP then Win7 and they get drowned out by people telling them to buy new computers as if buying a win10/11 computer was the actual issue. No, the issue is some games NEED old windows and used Steam as a DRM provider so only piracy will fix it. Valve *could* have made a client that didn't use Chromium that could only download and register steam tickets for old games, but nah, too consumer friendly that, just let your army of
Re:It's time for us to go to war with Digital Only (Score:5, Informative)
While I consider myself a digital native, the idea of a digital only future for media is terrifying.
I haven't used analog media in 40 years, and I don't miss it at all.
My children have never even seen an analog vinyl record or cassette tape.
Do you perhaps mean "online" or "streaming" rather than "digital"?
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Do you perhaps mean "online" or "streaming" rather than "digital"?
No he means digital the way it is commonly used in marketing. Sure you can go all pedantic about definitions, but all you'll achieve is to confuse people who have no idea what you're talking about, and look like a pointless pedant to people who do.
Re:It's time for us to go to war with Digital Only (Score:5, Insightful)
No he means digital the way it is commonly used in marketing.
Really? I don't recall ever seeing "digital" used as a synonym for "streaming" in any marketing material. I checked the first ten results on Google, and not a single one of them defines or uses "digital" in that way.
Of course, streaming data is "digital", but so is data on a disk or tape or SD-Card or anything else.
Would you describe a DVD as "non-digital"? Should we call them "Non-Digital Digital Video Discs"?
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Really? I don't recall ever seeing "digital" used as a synonym for "streaming" in any marketing material.
I think you just outed yourself as lying. This story here isn't about streaming, it's about downloads. There is however another story on the front page right now where they use "digital" for streaming (also from the internet), so literally you not only recall seeing it, you are confusing all the places you've seen it.
I checked the first ten results on Google, and not a single one of them defines or uses "digital" in that way.
Google? What are you using Google for. Go and buy something. Like a music CD which comes with a "digital" copy redeemable via typing a code into a website and downloading an MP3. The term "digi
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https://www.merriam-webster.co... [merriam-webster.com]
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I don't think that's a good idea. They should be corrected, not permitted to redefine, away from reality, what is correct.
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Do you perhaps mean "online" or "streaming" rather than "digital"?
You know exactly what I mean, but you just keep acting all pompous.
Re:It's time for us to go to war with Digital Only (Score:4, Interesting)
My children have never even seen an analog vinyl record or cassette tape.
Do you keep your children locked in the basement? Walmart and Target sell vinyl records. There's been something of a resurgence of popularity lately, and it's not just old folks buying them out of nostalgia. When Taylor Swift released her latest album, there was a big box full of vinyl records right in front of the check-out lanes, you could not have missed seeing it.
Hold on while I text my father and ask him if he remembers listening to Tay Tay back in the 70s on his Lafayette...
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there was a big box full of vinyl records right in front of the check-out lanes, you could not have missed seeing it.
Well ... yes you very much could have missed it given how insane the swifties were and how they go rabid for every release. There's copies of her records now going for $400+ dollars, and they are getting bought by people without record players.
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My kids came home talking about analogue on the sense of IRL and when I started correcting them, it became clear that they were using the wording as their teachers do...
So I went on to explain that things in real life are just called real or tangible, and analogue (analog if you will) is used where there's an analogy between typically a signal and a measured value. (Fuel level in the tank, fuel gauge on the dash and such.) I do hope they go ahead and correct th
Digital is not the problem (Score:2)
Absolutely this ^^^^^^ (Score:2)
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For gaming, we're already passed the point where the physical media makes any difference from a preservation standpoint. Most games these days ship in an unfinished state, or are reliant on server-side features which tend to get shut down after the console is considered obsolete. The main advantage to buying games on physical media is the ability to preserve your first sale doctrine rights. However, if you aren't inclined to become bored with your games and put them on the second-hand market for a few bu
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Most games these days ship in an unfinished state
It may be a moot point, but "most popular" games - yes, but not most. By sales volume you're right, it's the big AAA crapfests that shit out a glorified license key on a disc and "patch" it later and that's the bulk of what gets into the most consumer's hands. But in terms of individual titles, most are still trying to release games in finished states. PC is a different kettle of fish where with the best will in the world there's really nothing you can do about all the combinations of hardware out there tha
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I have a Mudhoney CD (March to Fuzz) that is no longer sold. Even though I have ripped the CD to my music collection Apple Music tells me I am not allowed to play it in my country (US).
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Microsoft tried that. It was not received well. In fact, Sony ended up mocking Microsoft for it.
The status quo we have now is the result - Microsoft tried, people reacted badly, Microsoft reverted to the old model.
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Why disk (Score:4, Informative)
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Why not take the Switch route and move to flash storage as the Physical Route?
Because Red Dead Redemption II on the Switch is 12GB and on the PC it is 113GB (simply the first example I looked up). The only reason flash storage makes financial sense on the Switch is because it costs ****-all to make at the size required for a Switch game with the majority being in the sub 8GB range.
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The closest analog on the market are microSD cards. Those bottom out at about 12 dollars, and there's no longer a big difference between 8G and 128G. Even hopping up to 256GB and you are barely over $20. A BD-XL blank is in the ballpark of about 6 dollars, which is certainly going to be more expensive than a mass production run of BD, but I don't have access to that data, and something similar could be said for bulk sourcing of NAND. The quality of experience for the ~$6 difference between a disk and NAND
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One can argue NAND is the media of choice given that virtually every game now requires a patch on release (saved to the SSD) and that the Series S Xbox doesn't include a BD drive at all.
Honestly I'm surprised at Microsoft's statement here.
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Flash memory does not "require electricity to recharge the cells holding data." Flash memory is non-volatile, at least over the medium term.
Over the very long term, yes... some of the trapped charge can leak and the memory contents can be corrupted. However, optical media degrade too, and I'm not sure which would degrade faster: An optical disk or a flash memory that's only ever read from. It's write-cycles that shorten the life of flash media.
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Why not take the Switch route and move to flash storage as the Physical Route?
Remember when AOL used to give away free CDs? It is ridiculously cheap to press optical media. Flash storage may have gotten cheaper over the years, but it's still a long ways off from being a reasonable way to distribute a 100+ GB game. Nintendo gets away with it because they charge fairly high prices for physical copies of their games, and the games themselves are a lot smaller because the console isn't actually running anything remotely resembling "current gen" hardware specs.
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Cartridges (Score:2)
This is certainly not about "digital" it is about optical media, and the challenges related to optical drives. In future consoles offline distribution could easily be transitioned to other media, such as cards. Yes, they cost slightly more - but that won't be MS's problem.
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Words have meanings (Score:3)
> Digital
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
No disc slot.. not IF but When...... (Score:3)
Digital gaming? (Score:2)
I guess I'll have to hang on to my old analog XBox.