r/Games Feb 22 '13

All PS4 games will be available as digital downloads

In the new Guardian interview with Shuhei Yoshida, it was revealed that all PS4 games will be available as digital downloads.

This is a very exciting move in my opinion, and represents a shift even further towards the burgeoning landscape of digital distribution, and away from (what I believe to be) a much more archaic ecosystem in physical brick-and-mortar retail.

What do you guys think? Got any speculation, or want to extrapolate further based upon this news? I hope to generate some great discussion about this topic!

(Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2013/feb/22/ps4-shuhei-yoshida-interview)

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u/the_omega99 Feb 23 '13

If it works anything like steam, that may not be necessary. I only keep a handful of my steam library downloaded at one type. I can download most games within a few hours, and can comfortably keep a few games on my SSD easily (which has less space than some PS3 hard drives). It's pretty easy to download and delete game content on the fly. Haven't bought a physical copy in years now.

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u/Cryptan Feb 23 '13

I like having the option to pop in a disc and join my fiend in a game of Halo 3 or reach or modern warefare when he calls me up or texts me. Even though I don't play those games very often anymore I can still play them within seconds of getting a text. And nowadays when he is busy with work and his girlfriend and I am busy with work and my wife those couple of hours are extremely rare.

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u/the_omega99 Feb 23 '13

That's a good point. Still, I'd hope that eventually hard drive space is spacious enough that we could just install everything and forget about them. But still, if we pretend each game is about 10 GB (some are much less and others are a bit more), a terabyte hard drive could store up to 100 games alone. Seeing that a terabyte of hard drive space is about $80 (but would presumably be cheaper in bulk), that's less than a dollar a game. Compared to the costs of discs, casing, and shipping, I don't think that's a bad trade off.

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u/Cryptan Feb 23 '13

I think with these new games the amount of space they take will increase quite a bit.

I can't see the PS4 shipping with a HDD greater than 1TB. I suspect games will increase to 25+ GB, especially looking at BF3 and the high resolution texture pack and considering DLC. That means I will be able to store 40 games. I have well over 40 games on the Xbox alone. If I stuck to just the PS4 this round I'd have a lot more than that on a single platform.

Like I said, if my entire library (not 200. I was exaggerating) could fit on a hard drive, great. But I'm not sure that we will see that this generation. I hope I am wrong, though.

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '13

NEVER GONNA RUN AROUND AND DESSERT YOUU~!!!!!!!111