The end of physical media & dedicated hardware: Inevitable?

[Nintendork666]

What I find most intriguing is the promise of an upcoming streaming future when so many gamers haven't even accepted an all-digital present yet. Present company included.

[Anapan]

I recently watched Pat the NES Punk do a stream about how it is becoming hard to sell obsolete toys, hardware and carts. While I think that he has a point about toy trains from the 40's and player piano reels being a hard sell, I still think game carts have only leveled off, tho for the record I've never sold anything on the open market, and I don't have many games. I do buy games from all eras.

I think it's kind-of neat that shortly my $80 (at the time) android wristwatch will be able to play games better than GTA: San Andreas for a small monthly fee in it's firmware instead of 3rd party functionality, tho I only really care about the Arcade, PSP and PS1 games on that device because I can't make out most text even at 320x320 resolution (native 1:1 240p with letterbox), so I have to know the game pretty well. My 8-BitDo Zero may need to be upgraded. Does anyone know of a better controller in that form factor? The Smallest GC Mini mod seems difficult.

[isiolia]

What I find most intriguing is the promise of an upcoming streaming future when so many gamers haven't even accepted an all-digital present yet. Present company included.

The larger promise of it is on a basic technology level. Figure, the ubiquity of video content today is vastly beyond what someone pushing an AV cart around school in the 80s would have even thought of. I could drop a link to Youtube in here and people would be a split second away from being able to watch it on-demand, something we can take for granted now thanks to continual expansion of remote storage and bandwidth. It started smaller, just like we've had efforts for game streaming before. There are plenty of existing options out there for remote computing (like Citrix) or even supercomputing (AWS HPC for instance). Still, ramping up game streaming efforts is a result of improving on available remote computing power and latency to make those sorts of applications more consistently viable. We aren't going to see the full potential of it until it's a reliable option akin to dropping in an embedded video today.

[Forlorn Drifter]

I think it's just a question of when at this point. That's what I'm wondering about- is this in 10 years, 20, 5? We don't really know.

My other question is how this will affect game development- depending on how companies make their money on these streamed games, I think it will affect the direction. I'm assuming based on what I can see currently that we will get GAAS stuff more often, with games outside that being old-school digital distribution. I'm thinking Assassins Creed Odyssey style stuff. I'm not sure how I feel about that. For some games it wouldn't have much of an effect, but it could have a bigger effect in other games.

[Nintendork666]

I'm at a stage in life where the idea of any media whatsoever being a tangible product seems foreign and antiquated to me.

Except for books and comics, oddly enough.

Maybe I should get an e-reader this year and just abolish physical media altogether.

[isiolia]

May depend on the reader for books. I find phones and tablets to work fine for those. The more book-oriented readers may not be great for comics, but a high PPI tablet is excellent for them. If you have Amazon Prime, then they have free ones you can check out (can only have a limited number in library at a time) to see how any devices you have might do for that stuff. Much as I like collecting trade paperbacks n' stuff, actually reading comics is nicer on my iPad Pro.

[Dikdikvandik]

Whenever this argument is made people seem to forget the internet is a potato in most parts of the world a large part of the US included.

[MrPopo]

The internet won't get better if we keep coddling those parts of the world.

[Dikdikvandik]

When I mentioned US Internet being bad somebody in Germany chimed in and told me how horrible it was.
Infrastructure isn't there for all digital yet. Then you have some people with Data caps can't forget that.
Plus places that just prefer physical media like large parts of Asia.

[Gunstar Green]

When I mentioned US Internet being bad somebody in Germany chimed in and told me how horrible it was.
Infrastructure isn't there for all digital yet. Then you have some people with Data caps can't forget that.
Plus places that just prefer physical media like large parts of Asia.

Yeah, if you think the US's internet sucks, take a moment to let it sink in that it kicks the crap out of what most of the world is dealing with.