A scant three years after the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One came out, all of the rumours and speculation surrounding this year’s E3 and Gamescom point to a surprise new half-generation of console. At the same time, Nintendo are preparing for the public reveal of the NX sometime this year, to wash away the disappointing performance of the Wii U. Whether a fairly simple evolution or a wholesale revolution, there’s one thing that all three manufacturers need to remember, and it’s that we’re not yet ready for a digital-only future.
A lot of analysts and pundits point to streaming videogames as the future for the market, with centralised servers and infrastructure beaming images to our TVs and computer screens, taking the complex, high-powered hardware out of our homes. We’ve seen early experiments with this, such as Sony’s PS Now offering up a catalogue of PS3 games, alongside the high-profile failure of Onlive, but streaming is still a long way from taking over the industry.
Instead we’re seeing a rising number of online-only titles, which require you to be connected at all times, and an increased reliance on having large day one patches and content updates. Looking at two of the biggest releases of the month, both Uncharted 4 and Overwatch have arrived alongside large game patches. UC4’s 50GB install was supplemented by another 5GB that added the entire multiplayer side of the game, while Overwatch received a whopping 10GB patch for day one.
According to Ofcom, the rollout of fibre optic internet means hat the average UK internet speed is on the cusp of breaching 30Mbps download, and while Akamai’s global analysis disputes this, it still points to a fairly healthy 13.9Mbps average. Of course, there are millions unable to reach such heady heights, for whom each 5GB patch is an arduous wait.
I’m one of them, with an internet connection that’s eternally trapped at 8Mbps, and it means that, when it comes to digital gaming, I invariably fave a long wait. I meticulously manage large downloads so that they only occur overnight, pause my Steam downloads until I actually need one of the endless stream of patches it throws my way, and so on. Even so, I can currently consider myself to be one of the lucky ones.
Dom, our reviews editor, moved house a few weeks ago, booking a new line with BT and fibre optic internet. After a 10 day delay, they “requested” a further two days to get him online and, fingers crossed, that has happened overnight. It’s been a truly ridiculous situation and a sign of the potential that we all face at some time during our lives, to lose some of our ties to the internet – mobile internet is a godsend, but far from a solution for many and not in this case.
Do you remember this video?
At E3 2013, the height of the tussle for public perception in the run up to the start of the current generation, Shuhei Yoshida and Adam Boyes poked fun at Microsoft’s plan to add DRM to physical game purchases, by demonstrating just how easy it was to lend a friend your disc or buy second hand games. It was a big PR win for Sony, but it’s easy to forget that this allowed them to tighten the DRM noose around the sale of digital titles.
To play digital games offline on either Xbox One or PlayStation 4, you need to activate it as your home or primary console, and this also allows other user accounts to play those games you’ve purchased. A secondary console, however, needs to be online and logged into the content owner’s account in order to play, and for a time, there was the inability to remotely deactivate a primary PS4 in the case that it had, for example, been repaired or stolen. To be fair, I’ve now discovered that this has been resolved for a long time, but Dom has remained affected by it and has been unable to play digital PS4 games for the last few weeks.
And therein lies my problem with the increasingly digital world of gaming, it’s far too reliant on the vagaries of the companies that we buy from. Instead of a nice, physical copy of a game that we can do with as we please, we’re hemmed in by these restrictions. Nintendo is currently the worst offender here, locking game purchases to a single console as opposed to an account, leading to awkward system transfers and a dependence on their customer support for if something goes wrong. It’s something that I really hope they resolve for the NX and future systems.
We’re left with the question of what happens 10 years from now. It’s been begrudgingly accepted that multiplayer servers are regularly shut down for ageing games – a topic for another time – but what about the game themselves? The best coal mine canary we have is the PSP, with the console’s storefront deactivated in 2014 in PAL regions, and at the end of March in Japan and the US.
Thankfully, you can use the system’s download list to still get a hold of purchased games, and you can still buy PSP games via a web browser. However, it’s not too big a stretch of the imagination for these options to be removed in a few years time. Compatibility to the PS Vita means that these games still have a purpose on the store, but with dwindling sales, you have to wonder how much longer that system will last, as well.
All of this is a far cry from the freedoms afforded to you with DRM-free sellers on PC, and even Steam lets you take a machine offline for 30 days at a time and has a dedicated game sharing system. Without generational divides or sweeping hardware changes, and with Windows rarely breaking compatibility with older software, many of the games that you could buy a decade ago on Steam work just as well today.
For some, there’s the desire to have something tangible in their hands, or the ability to resell it later on, but I actually find myself a little torn. On the one hand, I love the convenience of having so many games at my fingertips, ready to load from the hard drive or memory card, but I’m not quite convinced that they’ll be there for me in a decade.
Tomhlord
Would I really want to play a game released today in 10 years time? Maybe, maybe not. I suppose it’s nice to know I could, rather than I would.
Severn2j
Minecraft & Team Fortress 2 are already 7 years old, and a lot of people are still playing them and will be for at least another 3 years…
Avenger
Great article, and it hits the nail right on the head for me.
I think we’re a long way from streaming games, in practical terms. Internet reach and speed wouldn’t do it justice at the moment. Also I’d want to own a copy, rather than pay subscription.
It’s difficult to say exactly with the 10 years from now thing though. If I buy digital it’s because it’s a good price, and I’m thinking of the here and now more than anything else. Whilst I’ve yet to come across a game that I’d like to revisit in ten years time, there are plenty of ten year old plus games that I’m divulging into now, so it will happen. Some of them are remasters, but most are games that I own and have freedom to play, either on PC or via backwards compatibility on Xbox One.
ron_mcphatty
These average UK internet speed figures make me laugh, I have always lived in built up suburban areas in Hampshire and the maximum we can get is 20 on fiber and 5 on the regular wires. I now get that 5 and it’s a huge improvement over the previous 2-3. I’ve tried OnLive and PS Now and it’s not good enough even on the lowest settings, if the next gen is streaming-heavy then I just won’t be able to participate. I’m sure most of the world is in the same slow internetted boat and the fewer outliers are dragging the average speed up.
ron_mcphatty
Oh and nice article Tef! It’s always interesting to revisit these old and persisting ideas, to see when they cropped up and how things have changed. I reckon in 10 years time Steam will be the only service not removing old games, we still won’t be streaming games but the inevitable extra bandwidth will be used to pump more content into our single player games, like bringing life to open world games by processing vast numbers of clever NPC actions on a server and populating our games with huge, lifelike crowds of animals or people.
MrYd
I think it’s the other way around. The average speed is being dragged down by those few places with terrible speeds. And by people sticking with slower connections when faster ones are available.
It’s something like 90% can get 30Mbps+, 50% can get 100Mbps+ and less than 5% stuck at under 10Mbps. So the average available speed is probably around 30, but with people still using ADSL when “fibre” connections are available for not much more, the actual average speed gets dragged down to under 15Mbps.
ron_mcphatty
Those numbers are interesting and truly frustrating! It’s very shit being stuck in that 5%, grrrr.
JR.
We’ll get there eventually but not yet. My attitude to digital games has changed A LOT in recent years. I used to be firmly against digital games and would only buy retail. I wanted to feel like I owned the game and a physical copy had more value in my mind. But after the PS4 came out and I was left with shelves full of now worthless PS3 games that I never play, I stopped keeping new games all together. If I buy a game on the PS4 or the XB1, I complete it and trade it in straight away. The odd game I will keep a little longer but if I feel like I’ve got everything out of the game that I can, I trade-in.
That’s the biggest issue with digital for me. You can’t trade in digital games. If they halved the price of digital games, I’d be more than happy to switch to go digital only. I don’t mind buying digital games in the sales but i would never buy a new digital game when in most cases they are 50% more expensive than retail.
I mostly rent new games now anyway. I’ve saved so much money on new games this year alone.
Andrewww
Technology in 2016 is generally quite unreliable. An isolated system, such as a device, can be tested and most of the times works halfway for what it should do (unless you get a firmware update or a piece of software like a game, that crash it).
That will not change in the near future.
Network connection is something, which may work often, but it never works reliably so far, as there are too many different systems involved (sometimes hacked provider systems).
I bought some games on PSN, e.g. Driveclub, and they work fine (after being heavily patched). But I’ll not go always-on or buy all digital-only anytime soon, or want to rely on streaming games, not next gen either.
bunimomike
Lovely article, fella. Hope you’ve queued Vermintide. :P 30GB is going to take a while.
Sitorimon
So I have a real angst about having my purchases from older systems being taken away. There was a time when some of my ps1 games were removed from my purchase list for some reason and then my ps3 broke. I couldn’t get hold of games I legitmately wanted to play, bought and imho owned. I feel like as a consumer, I have no rights. I worry that my large digital collection will be revoked and it would be beyond my control and the reality is quite real. Desura is the indie Steam and it’s had money troubles for a long time. When/If it dies how will anything DRM wise work on a dead platform anymore? I feel vulnerable and I certainly dont feel assured when apps are removed and so on etc. In order to get me to buy in, I want to know I will always have my games for me.
Does it really cost a lot to have a few web pages of games that are niche up there?
ron_mcphatty
I think the guys at TSA have tried to explain this whole deal before, I certainly haven’t understood it yet but I get the impression that we no longer buy a copy of a game, only a license to play which can be withdrawn. I think this may encourage piracy in the long run, so as a positive in five or ten years time an obsolete PS3 should be easy enough to hack and download ripped games for. Whether that’s still piracy if you’ve paid for the game in the past I really don’t know :)