this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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At these sizes I'm starting to think that game devs should just go back to physical storage.
If I'm going to have to store 100 + GB, then the storage space is now a meaningful contributor to the cost of the game. It looks like quad-layer Bluray disks can store 128 GB. I'm not sure what the cost to produce them is, but I'd be curious if it's worse than the cost players have to pay in buying more storage space for these giant games.
Consoles still have physical storage as an option, at least partially.
For PC: the vast majority of PCs don't have a blu ray drive. So that's a $50-100 expense. Or a 1 TB SSD is under $100. Going with physical media makes no sense here, even ignoring the other glaring problems, like game updates and loading times.
Cost of production of a blu ray disc will be cheap. Packaging and shipping it slightly less cheap. Dealing with a retail store exceptionally less cheap. A digital copy sold will see >95% of revenue kept (first party sales — some amount lost to transaction fees), or ~70% kept (sold on third party digital platforms). A physical sale will see closer to 50%. It's a huge difference.
As far as I know, the Xbox One and PS4 started the trend of reading nothing from the disc after install. The disc just acts as instalation media and a physical authenticator.