Microsoft's Gaming CEO Says Xbox Won't Go All-Digital Just Yet - Slashdot

Posted by msmash

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  Is a decade later when the servers shutdown the discs still work offline, or will the mandatory day one patches and dlc mean the discs are just stubs. Already happened with many games. Also if they are so confident make Windows computer manufacturers bring back disc drives to laptops again.

  • Discs have been stubs since the PS3/Xbox360 era

    Every disc game I have for my PS4 the game on the disc is a far cry from what I actually would "want" to play if there were no updates.

    Perfect case in point I have a launch disc version of Cyberpunk (because I was gullible), the version I "own" is pretty terrible and unplayable. The version with updates is actually pretty fantastic. If I didn't have internet or update servers what I own is basically a coaster.

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      In other news, Gamers raging on the uselessness of discs because they reward developers shipping an incomplete and untested product. Film at eleven.

      I'm sorry, I've misspoke. For the record, the correct headline was: Gamers raging on the uselessness of discs because they reward and demand that developers ship an incomplete and untested product. Film at eleven. On behalf of the studio, Our most sincere apologies for the mistake.

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        You sound like the kinda folk who go to parties and talk about how you don't own a TV.

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      No, it is better than nothing. Perhaps you should avoid buying games that are buggy as shit on day 1 and need a zillion patches to be enjoyable. Also, some of us actually enjoy playing single-player games and don't care about battling with 10-year-old strangers.

      In the old days, PC games had copy protection on the CDs, but patches could be freely downloaded and archived forever. That would be a nice compromise for consoles, but of course nobody can be reasonable in this industry.

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    The day one patches make a joke out of the whole thing. At least first-party titles on Nintendo hardware seem to be mostly functional. I like platformers more and not FPS, though.

    • Re:

      ACNH shipped in what could be considered an unfinished state, probably due to factors resulting from the Covid pandemic. Sure, it's likely not full of game-breaking bugs, but it's missing so many aspects of gameplay which were added in later updates.

      Heck, my partner recently decided to check out Palworld to see what all the hype is about and he asked me if the "unfinished game" disclaimer that pops up when you launch it is anything to worry about. I told him "Nope, that's pretty much standard industry pra

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    Have you seen x-box's quality control? The drives in the OG xbox, and 360 are absolute garbage and scratch the discs up.

    What Microsoft should be doing is what Nintendo did, and put a "sd card" type of media slot on the digital-only models so that there is still a possibility of having physical media. I'm sure a 256GB flash chip is more expensive than an optical disc that holds 1/10th as much, but the problem has always been that downloading the game takes forever, even on fiber internet. If I have 1Gbit fib

• "Because so few manufacturers are still making physical disk slots"

  WTF does that even mean? It's a slot.

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    It means he has a 'disk' and when he wants to use it he looks at his xbox and it has a 'slot' in it that he puts it in. So that's what he calls them, and clearly someone must make them.;)

    Seriously though, a more accurate term for 'slot' would be 'slot loading optical media drive'. It's not entirely ridiculous to shorthand that down to 'slot'.

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    He means both the slot and the device behind it, aren’t usually considered “standard” equipment anymore. Not a surprising stance considering he’s in manufacturing and watched the PC make that slot extinct.

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      Yeah at first I thought that was confusing because USB optical drives are dirt cheap but you're right that the slot loading style mechanism used to be in cars and is now just in consoles.

  • Re:

    You know those people who call the desktop or tower portion of their PC a "CPU" or "hard drive"? Yeah, it's like that. Some people can't be bothered to learn the proper nomenclature, or they're using the wrong terminology on purpose to troll the pedants.

• by Junta ( 36770 ) on Wednesday February 21, 2024 @01:15PM (#64257688)

  Xbox Won't Go All-Digital Just Yet

  Nothing quite matches the warmth of a good old analog video game.

  I wasn't even aware that any video game platform for the last 40 years or so supported any non-digital games.

  • Re:

    That's what happens when you have an idiot interviewing a moron.

  • • 2 hidden comments

• While I consider myself a digital native, the idea of a digital only future for media is terrifying. Whether it be games, movies, music, or other. We should not allow our digital overlords to take physical away. It takes away so many rights we as consumers should have (backups, resale, etc).

  It also makes a world in which these machines and tech will die once the manufacturer gets bored with the platform. At least with physical products and media, they can be hacked and returned to life by the community.

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    I dunno, i think it would be kind of cool to allow companies to completely control the narrative of their work forever and ever.
    Like take the movie "stand by me"; the ENTIRE cast is white. what about diverse audiences? What about differently abled people? Clearly the movie is completely out of date given societal standards and mores circa 2024.

    By having everything digital only, it would allow the producers to update movies and media to better fit modern audiences. And it would prevent the fringe-MAGA types

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    • Re:

      Nice troll post. I'm sure someone will bite but you kind of went a little to over the top. 5/10.

  • It's gonna take an act of legislation saying that media owners have to provide up to date and DRM free download of these types of things to customer who paid.

    Ironically the music business of people already have this, it's pretty simple to purchase a album of music in AAC/MP3/FLAC format and have that digital copy forever. The same cannot be said for movies almost at all and games it's a half and half with places like GOG and Humble Bundle offering DRM free purchases but the big dog is Steam who does not but nobody is worried about that since steam has been around for like 20 years with no issues.

    If the answer to "digital only is a problem" is "physical media" unfortunately I would say that is an ultimately losing battle. The public likes digital only, they like streaming services, people love Spotify and Steam and other things. We can complain that they shouldn't but the vast majority of people are not concerned with the principles of the matter, they just want what they want in the most convenient form.

    • Re:

      Too be fair, there's a few Good Old Games on gog.com that
      should be played with (unofficial) patch sets--downloaded from other sites!
      The official patches didn't fix *enough* bugs.

  • While I consider myself a digital native, the idea of a digital only future for media is terrifying.

    I haven't used analog media in 40 years, and I don't miss it at all.

    My children have never even seen an analog vinyl record or cassette tape.

    Do you perhaps mean "online" or "streaming" rather than "digital"?

    • Re:

      No he means digital the way it is commonly used in marketing. Sure you can go all pedantic about definitions, but all you'll achieve is to confuse people who have no idea what you're talking about, and look like a pointless pedant to people who do.

      • No he means digital the way it is commonly used in marketing.

        Really? I don't recall ever seeing "digital" used as a synonym for "streaming" in any marketing material. I checked the first ten results on Google, and not a single one of them defines or uses "digital" in that way.

        Of course, streaming data is "digital", but so is data on a disk or tape or SD-Card or anything else.

        Would you describe a DVD as "non-digital"? Should we call them "Non-Digital Digital Video Discs"?

        • Re:

          I think you just outed yourself as lying. This story here isn't about streaming, it's about downloads. There is however another story on the front page right now where they use "digital" for streaming (also from the internet), so literally you not only recall seeing it, you are confusing all the places you've seen it.

          Google? What are you using Google for. Go and buy something. Like a music CD which comes with a "digital" copy redeemable via typing a code into a website and downloading an MP3. The term "digi

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      You know exactly what I mean, but you just keep acting all pompous.

    • My children have never even seen an analog vinyl record or cassette tape.

      Do you keep your children locked in the basement? Walmart and Target sell vinyl records. There's been something of a resurgence of popularity lately, and it's not just old folks buying them out of nostalgia. When Taylor Swift released her latest album, there was a big box full of vinyl records right in front of the check-out lanes, you could not have missed seeing it.

      Hold on while I text my father and ask him if he remembers listening to Tay Tay back in the 70s on his Lafayette...

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      • Re:

        Well... yes you very much could have missed it given how insane the swifties were and how they go rabid for every release. There's copies of her records now going for $400+ dollars, and they are getting bought by people without record players.

    • Re:

      Thank you for the hints for proper wording.

      My kids came home talking about analogue on the sense of IRL and when I started correcting them, it became clear that they were using the wording as their teachers do...

      So I went on to explain that things in real life are just called real or tangible, and analogue (analog if you will) is used where there's an analogy between typically a signal and a measured value. (Fuel level in the tank, fuel gauge on the dash and such.) I do hope they go ahead and correct th

  • Digital is not the problem

    Ownership is. But if they announce they want to go "All Subscription" they're going to get flamed a bit more. They's sugarcoating it with "Digital" so that it makes sense to the masses, like "duh we're digital already, fair enough". It's language manipulation. Also, the physical components/add-ons of videogames back in the day were lovely, like cloth maps, nice box art, manuals etc...

    • Absolutely this ^^^^^^

      Reminds me of when a developer bought an ice factory downtown in order to build condos. After closing the ice factory down, they left the property vacant for like 10 years while it appreciated in value. When they eventually put it on the market to sell to another developer to buy it and actually follow through and build condos, people were like, "Yay! At least condos would make use of that space that isn't being used."

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    For gaming, we're already passed the point where the physical media makes any difference from a preservation standpoint. Most games these days ship in an unfinished state, or are reliant on server-side features which tend to get shut down after the console is considered obsolete. The main advantage to buying games on physical media is the ability to preserve your first sale doctrine rights. However, if you aren't inclined to become bored with your games and put them on the second-hand market for a few bu

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    I have a Mudhoney CD (March to Fuzz) that is no longer sold. Even though I have ripped the CD to my music collection Apple Music tells me I am not allowed to play it in my country (US).

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  • Re:

    We should not allow our digital overlords to take physical away. It takes away so many rights we as consumers should have (backups, resale, etc).

    Microsoft tried that. It was not received well. In fact, Sony ended up mocking Microsoft for it.

    The status quo we have now is the result - Microsoft tried, people reacted badly, Microsoft reverted to the old model.

  • Re:

    sorry you have already lost that war, the convenience of digital has been a worthwhile trade for the majority. I must admit I was a physical only person 5-10 yearrs ago, but now I would not buy a physical media version even if it is cheaper..

• by Himmy32 ( 650060 ) on Wednesday February 21, 2024 @01:19PM (#64257700)

  Why not take the Switch route and move to flash storage as the Physical Route?

  • Re:

    There's at least overlap with Blu Ray / 4k players with a disc drive. Like if I replaced my Xbox I'd want one that can still play my discs rather than have multiple HDMI cords to route to the TV.

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    Because Red Dead Redemption II on the Switch is 12GB and on the PC it is 113GB (simply the first example I looked up). The only reason flash storage makes financial sense on the Switch is because it costs ****-all to make at the size required for a Switch game with the majority being in the sub 8GB range.

    • Re:

      The closest analog on the market are microSD cards. Those bottom out at about 12 dollars, and there's no longer a big difference between 8G and 128G. Even hopping up to 256GB and you are barely over $20. A BD-XL blank is in the ballpark of about 6 dollars, which is certainly going to be more expensive than a mass production run of BD, but I don't have access to that data, and something similar could be said for bulk sourcing of NAND. The quality of experience for the ~$6 difference between a disk and NAND

      • Re:

        One can argue NAND is the media of choice given that virtually every game now requires a patch on release (saved to the SSD) and that the Series S Xbox doesn't include a BD drive at all.

        Honestly I'm surprised at Microsoft's statement here.

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    Flash degrades faster than an optical disc. As it requires electricity to recharge the cells holding the data. There's already reports of some 3DS game cards failing due to being left on a shelf too long. (They use the same flash media as USB thumb drives.) The WiiU has multiple reports and even hardware modifications available to deal with the defective internal flash storage. Which holds the OS and cannot be fully fixed without a backup made using homebrew. (The flash holds unique per-console data that is
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    • Re:

      Flash memory does not "require electricity to recharge the cells holding data." Flash memory is non-volatile, at least over the medium term.

      Over the very long term, yes... some of the trapped charge can leak and the memory contents can be corrupted. However, optical media degrade too, and I'm not sure which would degrade faster: An optical disk or a flash memory that's only ever read from. It's write-cycles that shorten the life of flash media.

  • Re:

    Remember when AOL used to give away free CDs? It is ridiculously cheap to press optical media. Flash storage may have gotten cheaper over the years, but it's still a long ways off from being a reasonable way to distribute a 100+ GB game. Nintendo gets away with it because they charge fairly high prices for physical copies of their games, and the games themselves are a lot smaller because the console isn't actually running anything remotely resembling "current gen" hardware specs.

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• This is certainly not about "digital" it is about optical media, and the challenges related to optical drives. In future consoles offline distribution could easily be transitioned to other media, such as cards. Yes, they cost slightly more - but that won't be MS's problem.

• > Digital

  You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.