Posted October 07, 2020
-----
PART 9/?
-----
Coreda: If those who actually cared about physical for PC had made more noise about higher capacity (and cheap) formats like BD there may have been some movement on this. However the ship sailed a while ago anyway. Are you nuts, biased or just deluded and / or uninformed? /s
This ship never sailed.
Remind me, how long has BD been available on GENERAL (non archival) market? Less than 20 years.
How about DVD? Or CD?
Heck, how old are Vinyls? But you do still have new releases on Vinyls now without sane justification for it.
It may be slightly unknown fact but BD disks cost about as much as DVD to produce.
Even more, most DVD pressing machines are either just stright out compatible or can be cheaply made to be able to press BD.
BD is right now actually cheaper for the industry than DVD, especially per GiB.
While there are reasons to keep CD around the DVD should already die.
The only real reason why BD are not so popular on CONSUMER MARKET is because some responsible people have retarded approach about it.
And don't even get me started on arbitrary price gouging.
If BD films would be sold for as much as DVD ones it would spread really fast.
The price gouging alone is one of the main reasons why this storage media is not so popular among film enthusiasts for example (to be clear, TRUE ones will go for QUALITY so they WILL buy them over DVD, but casual average-joe ones will NOT due to cost).
That is the commercial market AKA "disks sold with data on them".
But in archival industry BD are booming. Do you really think somebody would sanely choose stack of 25 DVDs over 1 BDXL ?
ESPECIALLY since BD use different technology than DVD (DVD have organic layers, suspectible to oxidation, disk rot, chemical reactions with air, as well as reacting with plasticiser from DVD cases, BD use non organic layers so they are not suspectible to most problems) and thus have better longetivity.
There are already 1 TiB prototype BD disks in research labs.
Do you really think archival industry would just drop the technology and downgrade to DVD?
For longterm storage you just cannot use hard drives. It's just too darn inconvenient (drives die, controllers die, write heads can randomly get stuck on platters after years of failless usage, platters demagnetise even when connected to power, random neutrino can make a bit flip, one powerful solar [the kind that is once few dozen years] flare could be enough to destroy a backup [or at least damage it enough to be useless]).
Tapes are another kind of pain that could warrant writing entire books about it.
The optical media is the only way to go if you want to have longterm cold storage backup.
At least until somebody invents something better, like Blade Runner like 3d data orbs or some sort of nonmagnetic nonorganic high density physically durable storage media.
The optical media right now has about as much longetivity as metal punch in cards. It's not magnetic so apart from physical damage and reflective layer deterioration there isn't really any way to loose it other time.
Do you really think with increased storage needs (thus increased longterm COLD STORAGE needs) the industry would not make BD more popular over time? (they do push high volumes of those disks you know)
After somebody brought Playism into this thread I researched it (honestly, I knew about it before but either didn't research it before or forgot about it).
It isn't (but generally is):
(note that this includes bundles [afaik], separate soundtracks and few other "non game" things on this list)
https://playism.com/products?&filter%5Bsort%5D=priceLow
(without this sorting it just doesn't show the number)
https://playism.com/products?&filter%5BtermFilter%5D%5B%5D=46
Total of 228 positions out of which there is 204 positions with DRM-free builds.
Example of Steam key only one:
https://playism.com/product/will-a-wonderful-world
https://playism.com/product/angels-of-death
(random games, right off the front page from bestsellers category, I don't know these ones)
I didn't make a complete research and / or page crawl yet but I haven't seen ANYWHERE on Playism site any kind of claims that 1.It is "all" DRM-free 2.That developer HAS TO provide DRM-free build to them.
It's entirely up to the developer to choose on that platform. Most provide DRM-free builds but there ARE some oddballs that stand out and don't do that.
Of course it doesn't undermine the whole Playism.
I am thankful somebody brought it to this thread and reminded me about it.
It is both the kind of store I would genuinely want to buy from.
As well as the kind of digital distribution platform I would personally choose should I ever decide to get my game projects out of infinite project freezer.
MysterD: If they make GOG Galaxy separate from GOG "Legacy" - well, "Legacy" could wind-up like GOG Downloader: pretty much dead and eventually phased out. If they would make it open source then it wouldn't matter if they would even abandon it.
That's the beauty of open source. Should there anybody want one could just fork it and continue development.
If GOG would merely "just" make API documentation public and expose a function to json checksums it would ALREADY make a WORLD OF DIFFERENCE and very likely result in SOMEBODY private from community cooking up software for file obtainment (AKA new, better than ever, OPEN SOURCE GOG downloader alternative).
MysterD: I think they really need to be clear from GOG's Own Games are DRM-FREE for when you're accessing GGO's Game via Galaxy (and also on the GOG website); and that other stores (like Epic) may have DRM in them (or not) - since GOG themselves are going down this path. I think what I described would work (at least from software perspective).
Because if they continue with their CURRENT way then they are going to eventually have a meet-up at a PR graveyard.
PART 9/?
-----
This ship never sailed.
Remind me, how long has BD been available on GENERAL (non archival) market? Less than 20 years.
How about DVD? Or CD?
Heck, how old are Vinyls? But you do still have new releases on Vinyls now without sane justification for it.
It may be slightly unknown fact but BD disks cost about as much as DVD to produce.
Even more, most DVD pressing machines are either just stright out compatible or can be cheaply made to be able to press BD.
BD is right now actually cheaper for the industry than DVD, especially per GiB.
While there are reasons to keep CD around the DVD should already die.
The only real reason why BD are not so popular on CONSUMER MARKET is because some responsible people have retarded approach about it.
And don't even get me started on arbitrary price gouging.
If BD films would be sold for as much as DVD ones it would spread really fast.
The price gouging alone is one of the main reasons why this storage media is not so popular among film enthusiasts for example (to be clear, TRUE ones will go for QUALITY so they WILL buy them over DVD, but casual average-joe ones will NOT due to cost).
That is the commercial market AKA "disks sold with data on them".
But in archival industry BD are booming. Do you really think somebody would sanely choose stack of 25 DVDs over 1 BDXL ?
ESPECIALLY since BD use different technology than DVD (DVD have organic layers, suspectible to oxidation, disk rot, chemical reactions with air, as well as reacting with plasticiser from DVD cases, BD use non organic layers so they are not suspectible to most problems) and thus have better longetivity.
There are already 1 TiB prototype BD disks in research labs.
Do you really think archival industry would just drop the technology and downgrade to DVD?
For longterm storage you just cannot use hard drives. It's just too darn inconvenient (drives die, controllers die, write heads can randomly get stuck on platters after years of failless usage, platters demagnetise even when connected to power, random neutrino can make a bit flip, one powerful solar [the kind that is once few dozen years] flare could be enough to destroy a backup [or at least damage it enough to be useless]).
Tapes are another kind of pain that could warrant writing entire books about it.
The optical media is the only way to go if you want to have longterm cold storage backup.
At least until somebody invents something better, like Blade Runner like 3d data orbs or some sort of nonmagnetic nonorganic high density physically durable storage media.
The optical media right now has about as much longetivity as metal punch in cards. It's not magnetic so apart from physical damage and reflective layer deterioration there isn't really any way to loose it other time.
Do you really think with increased storage needs (thus increased longterm COLD STORAGE needs) the industry would not make BD more popular over time? (they do push high volumes of those disks you know)
After somebody brought Playism into this thread I researched it (honestly, I knew about it before but either didn't research it before or forgot about it).
It isn't (but generally is):
(note that this includes bundles [afaik], separate soundtracks and few other "non game" things on this list)
https://playism.com/products?&filter%5Bsort%5D=priceLow
(without this sorting it just doesn't show the number)
https://playism.com/products?&filter%5BtermFilter%5D%5B%5D=46
Total of 228 positions out of which there is 204 positions with DRM-free builds.
Example of Steam key only one:
https://playism.com/product/will-a-wonderful-world
https://playism.com/product/angels-of-death
(random games, right off the front page from bestsellers category, I don't know these ones)
I didn't make a complete research and / or page crawl yet but I haven't seen ANYWHERE on Playism site any kind of claims that 1.It is "all" DRM-free 2.That developer HAS TO provide DRM-free build to them.
It's entirely up to the developer to choose on that platform. Most provide DRM-free builds but there ARE some oddballs that stand out and don't do that.
Of course it doesn't undermine the whole Playism.
I am thankful somebody brought it to this thread and reminded me about it.
It is both the kind of store I would genuinely want to buy from.
As well as the kind of digital distribution platform I would personally choose should I ever decide to get my game projects out of infinite project freezer.
That's the beauty of open source. Should there anybody want one could just fork it and continue development.
If GOG would merely "just" make API documentation public and expose a function to json checksums it would ALREADY make a WORLD OF DIFFERENCE and very likely result in SOMEBODY private from community cooking up software for file obtainment (AKA new, better than ever, OPEN SOURCE GOG downloader alternative).
Because if they continue with their CURRENT way then they are going to eventually have a meet-up at a PR graveyard.
