Will Scorpio have a disk drive at all - since X1 did not at first?

Like Genchy said, if your internet goes down it can be a pain in the backside. Luckily my broadband overall has been ok, few hiccups but that's technology for you.

Like I said before I don't know how it all works but I just thought you have two versions of a console, one with a drive, the other without so I thought the one without would naturally be cheaper but maybe it's not as simple as that.

Either way, my consoles today, future ones I shall remain digital. Number of reasons I personally prefer it, one being I like the fact that there's already games sitting on my HDD waiting for release. No waiting on postman, not having to get down the shop,
maybe I'm just lazy lol

As I said before though, I 100% believe sometime in the future there will be no more discs, either we will download the games or stream them. For those that stick with discs now, what would you do come that time? Obviously a way off and by then we could
be bored of gaming but just say for example Scorpio ( obviously directed at those that want it ) came with no disc drive, would you consider it or move on?

 

When there is a outage and Xbox Live goes down, a large number of users complain on the forum's and on the Ambassador chat that they can't play their digital games. The general consensus seems to be that to play your digital games, you need to always have
a connection to Xbox Live, this however is completely wrong.

To continue to play your digital games offline during an outage you need to place your console in 'Offline' mode via the settings and the console you are playing needs to be your Home console. This way, the only time a digital game becomes an issue either
due to Xbox Live downtime or your own connection going down is when the system you are playing on is not the 'Home' console.

Many people don't realise this.

 

From discussion so far I conclude Scorpio will come with a disk as option at least - or backward compatible would rule out all that bought on disk already.

No disc option would mean - no go Scorpio - for me. I expect to run games for X1 I purchase now, which all will be on portable disk.

I'm really impressed with the backward compatibility on PC as one, so hope MS do the same for Xbox.

If let's say MicroSD card becomes standard instead as portable media, we can always transfer iso-images of disk(or whatever it is called in BD/UHD). Isn't that pretty much what Xbox do installing on hdd from portable media, unit reads from iso-image? So
put BD in PC and transfer the image to MicroSD.

Many developers, not only MS, has overestimated what we are prepared to do on the cloud thingy. I bought a backup program recently, and they put an awful lot of effort making cloud storage - as if I would gladly put my privary online basically as well as
putting 1TB up and down over internet for this purpose.

 

Like I say though Obsessive its not just about games, there was nothing I could do to watch my digital copies of Game of Thrones when my net went down. And for me (and I suspect others) that's not an option for a product I own. Ok it happens once in
a blue moon but that one blue moon was one too many for me.

 

BookishFlunky90

Xbox One does not read installed games as an ISO image. It doesn't have to emulate an optical drive on the hard drive to run a game. It runs its games from the hdd the same way that PC's do it. The data from the disc is copied to folders on the hard drive
with an executable file being the launcher of the game. It does the same regardless of whether the game is being installed internally or to an external hard drive.

It doesn't matter what type of storage is used to run a game, the file structure and the basic way it is accessed is the same. But Xbox One will never allow the use of SD and Micro SD for game installs. The reason being that not all Flash storage is created
equal. There are different speed classes. These classes also apply to USB Flash drives too. If MS allowed users to install Xbox One games to SD or Flash drives, there would be big support issues as most users would simply opt for the cheapest storage which
would have a dramatic effect on game performance.

Which is the reason why the console only supports USB 3.0 hard drives and a minimum of 256GB.

 

Thanks for explaining, Obsessive Power.

Just thinking MicroSD would be a source for installning on hdd, through an iso image of a BD.

Not running games directly.

A BD drive is rather slow, and games are read into memory preparing the scenes to be run.

I installed on my 360 disk 2 from GTA V on a usb drive, because it was recommended to avoid some jumping on hdd that would be to slow, it was recommended as a workaround on early releases at least(maybe fixed now). And there are different speed such usb
drives as well. This was running games directly from media.

But just allow installer run from MicroSD, why not?

It could be a standard developed, if not already - that emulate BD drive just as thumbdrives on usb emulate hdd.

I looked at bit now on usb BD drives - and there are plenty to choose from.

But not sure if UHD anything yet - it had something called BDXL, which 128GB space on some disk. Not sure what this is?

 

If you used a fast SD-card, you wouldn't need to install to hard drive, you could could just run it straight from the SD-card or indeed from a top end USB 3.0 Flash drive. Top tier SD Memory are capable of reading data at just over 312MB/s (Megabytes per
second), which, incidentally, is the just slightly over the maximum speed of the SATA II interface that both the Xbox One and the PS4 hard drives use. Games are not copied over as an ISO like I said before.

The main reason games are on Blu-ray is cost. I would say a Flash stored 50GB game would add an extra £10 to the overall cost. BD discs are cheap to mass buy and mass duplicate, SD and Flash drive games would be expensive.

The Nintendo DS, the 3DS and the PlayStation Vita use SD cards for their games. But they use SD storage for practical reasons, because with the device being portable, a small disc format would drain the battery more quickly - case in point, the PlayStation
Portable.

In the case of GTA V for the 360, the recommendation is to install only the Install disc to the hard drive and not the play disc as well. If you did choose to do both, the poor Xbox 360 hard drive has to work much harder to stream the data. You can actually
improve the experience on the disc version of the game by installing the 'Play Disc' to a suitably fast USB Flash drive.

BDXL is a special type of Blu-ray disc and needs a BDXL capable BD drive to be read. I doubt whether the format will take on, the discs themselves cost almost as much as the drives that read them. A typical BDXL disc can cost anything from £35-£50! With
a maximum disc size of 128GB, it's cheaper to buy a 500GB or 1TB external hard drive. To my knowledge BDXL drives can not read UHD movie discs.

Blu-ray drive take up for PC's is quite low. Software and games are not available on Blu-ray. Games either come on multiple DVD's or are only available digital only. I haven't bought a PC game on disc for over three years and most game stores are no longer
selling PC games on disc as the publishers are no longer releasing them.

 

Why do people think the physical games are a dying format. LOL.

Just do a search for EA investor reports and check out their revenue for 2016, any quarter you like. And actually have a good read of their financial figures. or here if you are lazy. lol
investor.ea.com/results.cfm

Last year Digital Sales finally beat Physical sales, and yes it was in the news, but it is not in the way that a few people here seem to think. Let me give you the break down on the final page of the Q2 Financial Year 2016 Report

Total GAAP Net Revenue

Packaged games and good - 58%

Full game Downloads - 8%

Extra Content - 17%

Subscriptions, advertising and other - 7%

Mobile - 10%

Total - 100%

In which world is digital vs physical taking over. EA digital platform includes everything they do digitally. Full games, DLC, Subscription, Fifa Packs, Mobile gaming, In Game Transactions, PC Gaming, ETC

Their physical Section, probably (And this is a guess, probably includes Merchandise, but don't quote me lol)

We have had this discussion before but i will state it again. Physical for console gaming is not going anywhere, anytime soon, for several reasons.

1. Price, nearly every country has physical is always cheaper than retail, especially at launch and drops a lot quicker as a game gets old. This is down to the closed marketplace that console companies control. Whereas physical has to compete in a national
market of many retailers

2. Game sizes do not suit the current internet structure around the world, with Americas known ISP caps and slow internet downloads, and long wait times for downloads for people in countries that have bad internet infrastructure. Or just plain bad servers

3. The ability to sell a game, once it is complete or rubbish, or just to trade in to get some money back. This is a plus to most people, especially those that look to get a new game on the back of one the have finished.

And before we get into the digital debate and the "EVERYTHING ELSE HAS GONE DIGITAL" debate, lets look at that.

Books. No matter what the book size, you will rarely, unless it has pictures, find one over 2meg

Music. Again, it does not matter what the song is. Size of song is dictated by kbs rate. So no matter the song, the file size is virtually the same if the quality is the same.

Films. Again, Film sizes do not vary much from Film to Film. Originally normal DVD's would fit to about 700mb with little loss of quality. Blu-Rays, normally if streamed, you can get away with about 3gb and still have a good technical picture. (Although
it is always crisper of the disc). And now we had UHD (4k - H.265 compression Technology) is going at about 5Gb.

Games. This is virtually the only media that is not constrained by a specific bit rate, but by how much the developer wants to put into a game. Yes we have compression in games, for music and graphics. But it only can do so much, especially when you are
talking about some seriously massive games. Just go back to 90s. The amiga could run a game off a 720kb disc. The Snes would fit onto a 1.4HD Disk (Although it was cartridge based). Then the CD era came, and we had 700mb games, and even 4 disc games like FF7,
That's 2.8gb on the PS1. The Xbox 360 - Blue Dragon, 3 discs. That's 13Gb. And now we have Blu-Ray with Games upto 50GB and beyond with an extra Download. Take Halo MCC for example.

And now we have 100GB discs, I don't know, if with 4k and now 8k round the corner, gaming sizes will peak and flatten out, but they show no signs of currently doing so. For the small minorty, Downloading will always be fine, and easy (120Meg U/L fibre here,
but i still buy physical - love cases. LOL) but for the majority, buying a disc, and inserting it in and just waiting a few minutes for it to install, is still the easiest way to go.

 

I don't think they are dying at all and all of your points are relevant and realistic. I'm also quite sure that no-one wants to loose their entire library if their account is banned regardless of why it was. I'll come right out and say that piracy is also
a problem when the older gen gamers such as myself don't feel like paying for data.

 

^ agreed with both posts above, Can't really argue against those points!

 

As for the post above, I don't think physical media is dying now. My hope is that Microsoft/Sony would offer a cheaper disc less console since I buy all my games digitally. Whether it will happen in the near future is a another debate.

Remember though folks, eventually things move on. If we didn't move with the times we would still be watching movies on Beta Max and VHS ;-)

 

Old Lofty, so it was you that caused the bottleneck in my network yesterday, so simple 5G took 3 hours to just make an system update to my brand new X1 - I should have guessed.

Or somebody streaming netflix or similar - making us all suffer.

I hate these digital downloaders bringing internet back to the 90's...

 

Physical Media for PC is pretty much dead though. Want a PC game? Go to Steam, Origin or Uplay, want software? In most cases now you need to go to the publisher's website. Even Microsoft Office can't be bought on disc anymore as far as I'm aware.

There are two reasons why PC game discs are disappearing now, the first is the fact that PC hardware manufacturers don't make PC's with Blu-ray drives. What's the point? How many PC users watch BD movie on their PC or laptop? PC downloads is a healthy
business, even now when games are 30-50GB. PC games never adopted Blu-ray as media delivery format. But then with the proliferation of software piracy on PC, DRM is everywhere. You can't trade-in modern PC games. So why put them on a disc that no one has
a drive that can read it? PC users are buying digital only and they don't want to buy a game that would require them to install it from 5 or more DVD's.

Then we come to the facts we know already. Consoles will come with disc drives for as long as consoles are sold in dedicated gaming stores where there are also games to buy on disc. Take out the disc and the store won't buy them from the manufacturer. Trade-in's
and used game sales are what stores account for most in profits, not new games.

They can make a console that is download only, but it won't sell well and wouldn't be much cheaper to buy anyway. So it won't happen, end of.

 

^ I've already said earlier it baffles me why anyone thinks that a console with no disc drive would be significantly cheaper. It wouldn't.

 

Genchy, it "baffles" you because it is not what anyone has said. No one has said it would "significantly cheaper". All that has been stated it would be cheaper, be that $5 or $50 or whatever, it would be cheaper.

It should not be "baffling" in the slightest that someone does not want to pay for a Device they never intend on using in the first place. Remember the entire Kinect paying for it arguments? Same applies with a Disc Drive. The solution is it should be an Optional
Feature not required and "forced" upon everyone, even those who never intend on using it.

That archaic slot in the front of my Xbox One or even my PS4 has never once seen anything but yet I was "forced" to pay for it on both.