What would be the priority from a business perspective? Saving customers the cost of a disc drive, or saving the company the cost of shifting production over to a proprietary thumb drive, most likely costing several times the price per unit of a disc?
Comment on GOG seemingly shares that they are considering physical PC 'big box' games. Maybe?
yakko@feddit.uk 1 day agoWhy not just sell it in a cheap little thumb drive? Most games like this are very modest in size, would save people the cost of a disc reader.
mastertigurius@lemmy.world 1 day ago
yakko@feddit.uk 1 day ago
I think the priority for the business is what people will buy. PCs don’t have disc readers as standard anymore. Now the barrier to entry for physical media is either pay more for a thumb drive or pay a lot more for a disc reader.
What if they adopted the C02 canister model. Slightly joking here, but why not treat the thumb drives as a recoverable container you can get a rebate for reusing?
rozodru@piefed.world 1 day ago
they cost about the same though. An Asus slim external 8x DVD usb 2.0 writer costs $50. a 256gb thumb drive costs $50. And i’m using 256GB as an example for modern games that can potentially be well over 100gb. Add to the fact said DVD drive is going to last a lot longer than a USB thumb drive. those thumb drives have a lifespan of like 5 years.
yakko@feddit.uk 1 day ago
In this specific case, that’s not apples to apples since most of the games on GOG are very small.
It’s kind of hilarious to imagine, but I can imagine doing a “BYO thumb drive” sale for physical media. They could even mail it back in the big box
daggermoon@piefed.world 1 day ago
Optical discs can store data way longer than nand flash storage.
bufalo1973@piefed.social 1 day ago
Then maybe EP/ROMs instead of flash.
yakko@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Do they need to?
daggermoon@piefed.world 1 day ago
5 years vs. 80. I’ll leave that up to you.
yakko@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Ideally we’d get to keep both around. I can see a world where we’re trading digital media around on discs deep into the next century, but I can also see how currently there’s also room for more transient media to serve less preservation-conscious people who don’t go out of their way to own a disc drive.