The move to dvd...
DOOManiac
Worst. Critic. Ever. Join Date: 2002-04-17 Member: 462Members, NS1 Playtester
Worst. Critic. Ever. Join Date: 2002-04-17 Member: 462Members, NS1 Playtester
in Off-Topic
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<b>As seen on <a href="http://www.shacknews.com" target="_blank">ShackNews</a></b>
According to a news post on GameSpy Daily, the German division of Eidos has announced that all their games will come on DVD as of 2003. Apparently Eidos is unhappy with the failure of copy protection on normal CDs, though how this will be better on DVD is not mentioned. Of course you can also put a lot more content on DVDs, eliminating the need for two, three or more CDs. It's unknown if Eidos UK and US will follow this decision. Do you think there are enough DVD-ROMs out there already to make this a good decision, and should other publishers follow?
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This reminds me of when CD-ROM first started to get popular and it was a big bold move for game developers to go CD only instead of supplying floppy disk copies of the game too.
Back then they used size (after all, 640MB would fill up your entire hard drive! More data storage than you'd ever need! It would take weeks to upload at 14.4!) as a really big discourager to piracy, as well as the fact that CD burners were evern more expensive then than DVD burners are today. In fact, DVD burners could be considered dirt cheap in comparrisson. That goes for the storage media too.
The good side to this is that now games won't come on 2, 3, even 4 cd's anymore. Its all on one disc, so there won't be any swapping. From what they've said about MGS2: Substance, it takes up a double sided DVD, so there's no way in hell it'll be economical to put it on standard CD media. And now maybe it won't take 1 friggin gig for each game you install.
But on the down side, this won't prevent piracy in any way at all. Anybody who thinks that is kidding themselves. The other downside, and this is the one that concerns me, is that now developers won't optimize space as much as they would have if they had to fit all the crap onto a CD or two. Say hello to extraordinarily huge load times again. And then what happens when the game is dumped to the hard drive anyway (since reading an entire game off the drive is not speed effecient), will they expect the user to have 6gb free?
The move to DVD is inevitable. But I think it needs to be a broader move than just Eidos, just in Germany. It needs to be coordinated, and they need to carefully avoid the mistakes made in the past. And the most important thing is not to use it if you don't need it. WarCraft III all fit onto just ONE disc, and that's with the amazing cutscenes and everything. But man oh man what blizzard could do if they had a dvd to fill up with cutscenes... mmm...
Just interested, what are the rest of you guys' thoughts?
<b>As seen on <a href="http://www.shacknews.com" target="_blank">ShackNews</a></b>
According to a news post on GameSpy Daily, the German division of Eidos has announced that all their games will come on DVD as of 2003. Apparently Eidos is unhappy with the failure of copy protection on normal CDs, though how this will be better on DVD is not mentioned. Of course you can also put a lot more content on DVDs, eliminating the need for two, three or more CDs. It's unknown if Eidos UK and US will follow this decision. Do you think there are enough DVD-ROMs out there already to make this a good decision, and should other publishers follow?
<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span id='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This reminds me of when CD-ROM first started to get popular and it was a big bold move for game developers to go CD only instead of supplying floppy disk copies of the game too.
Back then they used size (after all, 640MB would fill up your entire hard drive! More data storage than you'd ever need! It would take weeks to upload at 14.4!) as a really big discourager to piracy, as well as the fact that CD burners were evern more expensive then than DVD burners are today. In fact, DVD burners could be considered dirt cheap in comparrisson. That goes for the storage media too.
The good side to this is that now games won't come on 2, 3, even 4 cd's anymore. Its all on one disc, so there won't be any swapping. From what they've said about MGS2: Substance, it takes up a double sided DVD, so there's no way in hell it'll be economical to put it on standard CD media. And now maybe it won't take 1 friggin gig for each game you install.
But on the down side, this won't prevent piracy in any way at all. Anybody who thinks that is kidding themselves. The other downside, and this is the one that concerns me, is that now developers won't optimize space as much as they would have if they had to fit all the crap onto a CD or two. Say hello to extraordinarily huge load times again. And then what happens when the game is dumped to the hard drive anyway (since reading an entire game off the drive is not speed effecient), will they expect the user to have 6gb free?
The move to DVD is inevitable. But I think it needs to be a broader move than just Eidos, just in Germany. It needs to be coordinated, and they need to carefully avoid the mistakes made in the past. And the most important thing is not to use it if you don't need it. WarCraft III all fit onto just ONE disc, and that's with the amazing cutscenes and everything. But man oh man what blizzard could do if they had a dvd to fill up with cutscenes... mmm...
Just interested, what are the rest of you guys' thoughts?
Comments
I bought Imperium Galactica 2 a while ago, and one thing which irritated me was having to change CDs all the damn time (it cam on 4 - every time you load a game from a different campaign you have to change CD). A DVD would have been welcome.
I don't have that much free disk space now (it vanishes so fast...). Games shouldn't be 1 gig to install (anyone remember the full install for Baldur's Gate 2?).
I don't see how moving the DVD will prevent piracy: as you mentioned, you can already get DVD-Writers for a fairly decent price (they aren't as cheap as a CD-RW though).
Blizzard made a StarCraft cinematic DVD... you can find it in their online shop. It's only got about 30/40 mins of footage - but it's got every cutscene from SC.
I can't wait until they start selling the DVD versions of games in the UK (where I live). It'd be nice to have every Half-Life game/expansion (original HL, Opposing Force, Blue Shift) on one disc. It'd probably never leave the drive.
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To tell you the truth, I don't care what they intend to do by 2003, because it's improbable that they'll still be existing by then.