Game size in todays market

So I come from the land of ps3, were blu ray games are norm, But now im buying an Alienware laptop and will begin gaming on that. So now I am wondering about game quality between the platforms and if they are on par or even better on the pc front with all the extra bells and whistles.

I checked out on WIKI the size of Battle Field Bad Company 2 and it says for the 10gb for the disc version and 15gb for the digital download. So now ive got a few questions.......

Does that 10gbs on the disc mean just dvd or blu ray copy aswell?
And why is the digital copy another 5 gbs bigger??
So this also mean blu ray was/is totally useless for games for the most part, I know MGS and a few other fully used the space but really it was redundant im guessing.

 

Mutiple DVDs are nearing a norm now for retail games. Back in 2004/2005 games started to move over to DVD.

I haven't seen to many games on blu-ray yet, but eventually a move will be made to that. Blu-ray though still does not have high enough market penetration. Also expect to see in the future games coming out on USB when sold at retail, especially if the price drops faster than the required space needed for games.

However with game downloading services such as Steam expanding rapidly that will most likely be the maintain delivery vehicle for games in the future.

 

Ya I figured as much, both the multiple DVDs and Digital Download. I think the Digital Download will be a much harder adoption rate, broadband will be too slow for file sizes of the future and Fiber Optic isnt cheap enough yet. That said why is the Digital copy another 5 gigs bigger??

 

Im not sure but the digital download might have all the patches included and the retail will have to download the patches after it is installed.

 

That does baffle me. It must have something to do with compression, but you would think that they would try and getting the download as small as possible to. I could understand some small difference depending how a MB, GB etc is defined but if its that big I don't really have an explanation.

And yes the digital download does suffer from poor internet connections. I have only ever bought the one game on steam for that reason, that being Half Life: Source which is not particulary big. I couldn't download something like Fallout 3 because it is just too big.

 

Strange; my Steam says 5840MB for BF:BC2 under "Disk usage". However, I don't know how large the actual download was.

 

I just migrated my entire steam collection over to a new laptop at a minimum it was 75+ gb. used all all of my connection for about a day or so straight but it did it just fine.

 

And my internet has a 10GB cap per month. Download a large game of 5-7GB and what am I left with...

 

If you wanted to do it more quickly, you could have made a backup, copied it across, and extracted it. Nonetheless, had you had retail copies of those games the whole thing would've been much harder, which speaks well of Steam.

 

You can also just copy the whole Steam folder over.

 

Per MONTH? Whoa. What provider? That cap seems quite low.

 

Actually digital download has already surpassed retail media in software sales IIRC. I believe I read that on ARS.

 

Its called not-US internet. I am in New Zealand where internet generally have data caps, the vast majority of countries are the same. New Zealand doesn't have particulary good internet for a developed country, although it is getting a lot better. The point really is someone of us don't enjoy the amazing connections of others.

 

Actually the US is behind compared to many European countries, Japan, and South Korea.

 

The US internet is behind when it comes to speed but we don't have monthly caps.

 

i just laughed.. the sheep joke came to my mind.. sorry

agree.. but some of the speeds are absurd.. they're quite high.. here in UK , u don't need caps.. speeds are crap especially in essex..

 

I have unlimited downloads thank goodness but internet speed is poor because i'm in a "rural" area. Basically in the UK only the big cities get good speeds.

My internet speed is max of 256kb/sec but the potential of the local connection is 4mb/sec but there's just too many people using it so it slows down.

 

Fair call as most rural areas are still on dial up. The government is throwing NZ$1.5 billion (about US$1 billion) at the problem, looking to have so called fibre to the door for 75% of New Zealand within 10 years.

I could get a large cap, say 40GB or so but that is highly unaffordable for someone of my financial means. Our internet connections though need to have no speed limit as such, you get what you get, upload spead though is capped. For example I get a 7.5mb download speed, but only a 760kb upload speed, ping tends to float around 100 (you simply can't play games outside of Australia and New Zealand). I pay about US$30 for 10GB of broadband a month, 20GB would be about US$40 and 40GB would be US$55 or so. On most NZ internet plans if you go over your cap your speed gets dropped to 56k, however on the really big plans you get pay an additional usage charge which is about about 1.5 US cents per MB.

 

Comcast is capped at 250GB per month. Most I've ever used is 100GB but average is about 30-40GB. But 10GB I feel for you. That really sucks. I'd rather have 2Mbps with unlimited cap than 10Mbps with a 10 or 20GB cap.

 

I would prefer to have a far larger data cap. There is very little out there that needs such high spends to run, but there is alot available that consume alot of data over time.

 

The BFBC2 install folder for my Steam copy is 6.16 GB, plus there's a related ~200 MB of files in a couple of other places.

My World of Warcraft folder, on the other hand, is 16.5 GB.

 

Australia's situation with respect to download caps was pretty bad until TPG came along:
TPG ADSL2+ plans.

 

Thats what NZ really needs is someone to completely shake up the market, Telecom though still holds the shackles way to strongly.

 

My speed may be crap (~200kbps direct download, rarely 500kbps) but at least I don't have to suffer with data caps. Unfortunately, download blocking/throttling/nonsense (torrents, p2p, for lower plans even FTP!) is normal. Good thing seedboxes exist. <3

Digital distribution will work in developed countries with good internet, but not in many developing (or whatever the PC term is) nations. Until high speed internet becomes ubiquitous, companies can't abandon retail. Otherwise an entire market will be cut off, and will have to rely on... other means.

I doubt I'd ever migrate to digital distribution until my download speed reaches at least 1 mbps. And I already have one of the more expensive plans available.

 

lies! as said before it's just over 6gb

wow. i went through 80gb of download only last week.

haha, where are you? i live in bodmin moor in cornwall and i have 8mb connection so i would have thought you'd be able to get at least that.

 

Ewww, the speeds in those plans suck. They have a great download cap, but damn, those speeds suck. Even where I live in the sticks we get better download than that.

Looks like TPG isn't even available where I live, lol. That's how rural my area is, lol.

 

The thing is, everyone has a data cap. Even if your internet is labelled as "unlimited", you're still restricted to a maximum amount you can download because you're using finite bandwidth for a finite period of time every month. Assuming your figure of 200KB/s (and I hope that's bytes, not bits), you're still limited to being able to download around 500GB every month.

If you're looking at the speeds in the table, those are shaping speeds - the speeds you get slowed down to after you exceed your monthly quota. If you look further, you'll see that typical ADSL2+ speeds are 10+ megabits per second, while the theoretical maximum for ADSL2+ is 24Mbps. Sure, not that fast, but it's entirely adequate, and definitely fast enough to exceed the quotas. Plus, once you do, you can download as much as you want at the shaped speeds.

Besides that, Australian ISPs haven't yet shown a penchant for slowing down peer-to-peer traffic in the way that some U.S. ISPs have.

 

i've had a letter once about their 'fair usage' policy, so even if it was possible to be truly unlimited it still wouldn't because they'd probably cut you off or at least warn they may cut you off if you keep on raping the downloads.

 

The maximum possible is about 648 GB (250kb/s for 30 days nonstop). I should probably try if this is possible one day. If it turns out they have it capped, I should probably complain and try to get something for free. The company has a poorly written Terms of Service that I've exploited before.

 

If by digital download it is referring to the EA Download Manager version, I believe that 15 gigs includes 10 for the game install (it's exactly the same as retail) and an additional 5 for the cached installation files which EADM doesn't erase until you tell it to. If you burn them to a DVD and then delete them from your hard drive, it won't take up any more space than the retail version.

I cheaped out on the hard drive on my gaming PC so I currently only have 320 gb, and out of that I still have 200 left.

 

My mistake. If that's the case, then it is MUCH faster than what I have currently.

 

lol i pity u.. here we get no cap and get crap speeds.. fiber optic is far away in 2012.. the stupid government plans superfast broadband and max us pay broadband tax but gives crap connections.. at least ur government bothers , ours can't give a damm.

 

Well our 1.5 billion on broadband had to come from somewhere...our taxes. If my memory is correct you British also need to pay a BBC licensing fee? The problem for New Zealand is that the government, mislead by ISPs particulary telecom, don't realise that its the cap not the speed that is the problem in New Zealand.

 

well all i can do is pray.. hopefully uni speeds are better and ports aren't closed.. then i can game without lagg..

 

streaming and downloading is much more viable nowadays with the faster download rates. alot of games use this method, such as wow

 

Steam is blocked at my uni. Instead of locking ports, they work the other way in that they open them. The speed at university is solid but it does get overloaded at peak times, mid day for example. It would also be a terrible connection to play on as pingtest suggests that pings are around 130 or so.

 

Ouch. When I lived in the dorms my first year of college I had the best internet connection I have ever seen in my life. The fastest downloads I saw were over 11MB/s from the internet. 8MB/s was not uncommon. Also ping was really low and they didn't block anything there. I guess it really really depends on where you go. This was at the Rochester Institute of Technology, so it figures though.

 

Funding wise I am at the equivalent of a US state university. And conisdering the government covers most of the cost of my study I can't really complain.

 

I'd kill for a constant ping of 130. Being in Asia, my ping is always 200-500. Though occasionally in the 100s.

 

Ping's quite good here.. about 100-150... hopeful imperial college's ping is low

 

I read an interview long ago saying that idsoftware might release a special edition of Rage that comes in a blue ray disk...

 

I digitally download every game that I have. When it says "10 GB and 15 GB for digital download" it means there is a 5 GB set up file to download and then from that 5 GB file, 10 GB's will be installed to your computer. After the setup has run its course and the game is installed, you can delete the 5 gig file. But yes... games are getting huge. I remember when games were 700MB and I thought that was big but now... Jeezzzz... Crysis was 7 gigs

 

GTA IV takes up 15 GB... now thats huge.

 

Steam accounts for a sizable amount of all PC game purchases, then pirating accounts for another chunk. Add to this MMO's like WoW that are installed vanilla on machines, and expanded by 20GB all by digital download. I'd say digital distribution has taken over disc media very easily.

This is very obvious in other areas as well. Look at the Blu-Ray player, it is barely catching on because of digital distribution of content on Netflix, Hulu, and Youtube. The only reason Blu-Ray has survived as main stream is due to the attachment to the PS3. Look at the Xbox and PS3, both have been clammering to put larger and larger hard drives on their machines and expand their online library of games and content by huge measures. New portable gaming devices like the PsP don't even have disk drives.

Digital Distribution is no longer "the future", it is here now and it is the dominant form of media distribution.

 

well the stars wars force unleashed games up 25GB.. that's even more huge..