Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by Cleffy

Quizzical, I didn't say a Flash USB Disk.  I said a USB Disk which can pretty much be any external hard drive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136227

Considering you can buy these retail for about $70.  You can mass produce them cheaper.

 

Now you're going to use traditional rotating platter hard drives?  That's spectacularly worse than using a USB flash drive, even.  Try to find a new rotating platter hard drive for $30 or less.  Any hard drive, desktop or notebook or server, internal or external, SATA or USB or eSATA or SCSI, any capacity, whatever.  If there were demand for enormous numbers of 1 GB hard drives at retail for $30, it's likely that no one would bother to produce them because it wouldn't be profitable; even if someone did, the threshold below which they wouldn't is surely not far below $30.  Hard drives have been around for decades, so I don't see that changing in the near future.

The problem is that hard drives don't scale down very well to make a very small one for very cheap.  Too many of the components are fixed materials that don't scale by anything analogous to Moore's Law.  Capacity does, but there are too high of fixed costs in other parts that would make even a theoretical 0 GB hard drive vastly too expensive to ship one with every copy of a game.  It's about the same reason that power supplies and computer cases don't become exponentially cheaper as time passes--or, for that matter, bananas and cucumbers.

There's also the problem that rotating platter hard drives are fragile.  Western Digital will sell you a much larger and much faster internal hard drive than the one you linked at a much lower price.  Any external hard drive has to be designed to withstand a lot of jostling, and that increases the costs considerably.  This is one of the reasons why USB flash drives are commonly used to transport data and external hard drives are not:  you can shake a USB flash drive, drop it, or whatever, and it will be fine, unlike a rotating platter hard drive.  Indeed, a DVD is a lot more durable than a hard drive, too.

A DVD avoids this.  Instead of having to spend $30 or more for every copy of a game you make, the costs of burning a DVD are probably under $1.  I don't know what the costs of burning a blu ray disk are, and while I'd expect them to be higher than a DVD, it's still vastly cheaper than the cheapest rotating platter hard drive.  That's why optical media is used:  it's dramatically cheaper, and the performance is good enough.

I agree with you
 

Here is some economic food for thought.... I just purchased a 16 gig Sony jump drive for 13 dollars.... actualy i bought 6 of them ... family  and friends love em ... stainless steel cases on a key chain ring ... how much do you think it costed to actualy manufacture the memory components in the drive, and when will that cost be less than the cost of manufacturing a useable Blu-ray disk. ...... not to mention Blu ray disks have the additional cost of manufacturing a drive to run them.... the drives that run the flash/chip memory have no moving parts and are software based <<<< CHEAP>>>>

I don't think it will be long before this technology cames back around and becomes the " IN " thing again. PC's are being sold without disk drives already. Chip based memory is passing up the disk media right now. first we will see it take over in the PC hard drive market... (since Hard drives are made of disk media) .. then it will "hopefully" return to media and gaming.

thanks peeps  ,  i now feel better .       I can wait 9 yeers .

I don't think it will be nine years away, but a blu ray player will cost well under $50 before it becomes common for games to require one. 

soon we will see the day when you don't even purchase  data on disks or drives of any kinda.

u will have a keychain or card in your wallet that data can be transferred to via wifi.  

You'll walk up to an interface at the store (i.e. Wally world) and choose the media you want transferred...whether it  be music, movies, or software.

if it were served on location, transfer would be fast.

anyone know anything about the wireless charging stations ??? i saw it advertised on television yesterday

i think most games are going to move to digital download its much better and you can never lose the disk cause your game and cd key is store on there hardware cant go wrong that is why i love steam so much.

I would tend to agree that there will never be any reason to ship games on hard drives. The simply fact is that hard drives have been around for very little money for a long time, and they haven't replaced optical media yet. Aside from the aforementioned durability issues, a hard drive is large and heavy, and has many mechanical components that would make it extremely extremely expensive and time-consuming to manufacture as a medium for software, as was previously mentioned.

The simple fact is that you just don't need a game shipped on an entire drive, let alone a big and complex re-writable drive, when you already have an optical drive. Optical discs do exactly what they need to for that purpose. They story a fixed quantity of data, cheap, that you can read.

So, as HHDs will never be anywhere near as cheap or durable as optical storage, and its advantages are absolutely irrelevant where shipping software is concerned, again, there is no way that they will ever become a good media for such a purpose.

As we can rule out solid-state and traditional hard drives, and as internet certainly isn't going to undergo some magical increase in speed over the next few years, as it already stretches all usable bandwidth within our communication infrastructure to its limits, optical media is here to stay, and blu-ray is definitely the next logical step a few years down the road.

Originally posted by rimaxo14

i think most games are going to move to digital download its much better and you can never lose the disk cause your game and cd key is store on there hardware cant go wrong that is why i love steam so much.

The problem is that right now the size of games seems to be growing much faster than average internet bandwidth. Sure, Steam's download is fine if your entire game is only a few gigabytes, but if we're talking about a 50GB Age of Conan install, that's an awefully big hassle to go through to get your game if you have to download it from scratch. I think the moment we start talking about more than an hour or two to download a game, you're already getting to the point that optical media presents less of a hassle.

USB flash drives will be passing blu ray here soon as far as cost+capacity goes. I think flash drives will be the next computer game. Or any game for that matter. It doesnt require an internet connection, just USB ports on a console/computer.

Let's just be clear here. A Blu-ray disc probably costs a few cents each to produce en masse for 50GB per disc, so unless someone here can show where one can obtain 64GB flash drives for far less than a dollar each, there will be no computer games on flash devices.

Originally posted by Catamount

Let's just be clear here. A Blu-ray disc probably costs a few cents each to produce en masse for 50GB per disc, so unless someone here can show where one can obtain 64GB flash drives for far less than a dollar each, there will be no computer games on flash devices.

the cheapest 64gb (14 more then blu ray) usb flash drive is 125$. While Blu ray movies cost somewhere around 15-20$ (depending on the age of the movie).  Unless there is going to be an advancment in disk technology, usb flash drives are going to be passing blu ray in the next 2 or so years. They will have double the space and be cheaper even father down the line. Flash/SSD technology is growing at a rapid rate. By the time SSD's catch up with HDs in spacxe and price, HDs will be obsolete and all the other technology based on SSD type technology will be ahead of disks. Disks, both dvds/bluray and Hard disks are going to be obsolete very soon.

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Originally posted by tvalentine

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Originally posted by Catamount

Let's just be clear here. A Blu-ray disc probably costs a few cents each to produce en masse for 50GB per disc, so unless someone here can show where one can obtain 64GB flash drives for far less than a dollar each, there will be no computer games on flash devices.

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the cheapest 64gb (14 more then blu ray) usb flash drive is 125$. While Blu ray movies cost somewhere around 15-20$ (depending on the age of the movie).  Unless there is going to be an advancment in disk technology, usb flash drives are going to be passing blu ray in the next 2 or so years. They will have double the space and be cheaper even father down the line. Flash/SSD technology is growing at a rapid rate. By the time SSD's catch up with HDs in spacxe and price, HDs will be obsolete and all the other technology based on SSD type technology will be ahead of disks. Disks, both dvds/bluray and Hard disks are going to be obsolete very soon.

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Blu-ray movies don't cost $20 because of the media though. Even if 64gb flash drives could be had for just $20 it would be $40 if there was a movie on it. The Blu-ray media it's printed on costs just a few cents, which means $19.98 goes to the studio/store and $0.02 goes to the cost of manufacturing. You'd have to get the cost of material and manufacturing down to 10 cents or less for a flash drive for it to be at all feasible to mass produce media on that format and even then I don't doubt that just the time it takes to flash 64GB of data to millions of drives would make it more costly than Blu-ray discs that are basically printed off a press.

If the production costs were equal, the fastest SSD's can write at what, 200MB a second - it would take 5 minutes to write each drive out with a movie. I'll give them the benefit and say this happens as part of the QC. This would still limit their production per day so vastly over Blu-ray discs which are manufactured with the data on them as part of the production process that costs could never compete.

Tvalentine, the problem is that your logic is heavily flawed here. You're comparing the retail cost of a piece of hardware (disc) AND a piece of intellectual property (movie) to just a piece of hardware (flash drive).

A blu-ray disc does not cost $30 to manufacture. That money is payed for the film, not the media.

From Blu-Ray.com: According to the Blu-ray Disc Association, the overall cost of manufacturing Blu-ray Disc media will in the end be no more expensive than producing a DVD. The reduced injection molding costs (one molding machine instead of two, no birefringence problems) offset the additional cost of applying the cover layer and low cost hard-coat, while the techniques used for applying the recording layer remain the same. As production volumes increase the production costs should fall and eventually be comparable to DVDs. (http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/#bluray_pricing)

According to this site here, as of early 2007, blu-ray manufacturing costs for dual-layer 50GB discs was about $2.25 each for large volumes, and being two and half years and a huge amount of volume back, that's bound to be considerably more than they cost to manufacture now. Let's just assume that cost though. Can you show me ANYTHING that suggests 64GB flash drives can be manufactured for anything even remotely close to $2 a pop? I seriously doubt it. That price will continue to drop as well, even if capacity won't go up. If they do hit DVD prices ($0.50 each according to the latter link), that puts them even farther out of the range of flash manufacturing costs.

Digital copies are the future, you can see big retailer companies already shifting in that direction (eb games per example).