eli5: Why are games sold in disks? Wouldn’t usb drives be more efficient and save space on the console?
In: Technology
Optical discs aren’t that much different than records. The basic technology to make them goes back over a century. You shoot liquid plastic into a master mold that has the data etched on it. That cools, you slap a shiny layer on top to reflect the laser light, and you’re done. Blu-ray discs are dirt cheap to manufacture in large quantities.
Flash storage uses microchips to store data. These are more expensive to manufacture. It requires specialized equipment and clean rooms. Plus making high capacity chips is more art than science. There’ll be a lot of rejects.
To put this into perspective, you can buy a pack of 50 name brand, high speed BD-R discs for about $50 USD. Since each of those discs can hold 25GB, that’s 4 cents a gigabyte. Yeah, these are blank, but the steps to make pre-recorded media aren’t much different.
Newegg has a name brand 256GB USB flash drive right now for just $35. That’s 13 cents per gigabyte. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s still three times the cost of those BD-R discs. That cost adds up over bulk production runs.
Now, some game consoles do use Flash storage. Namely the Nintendo Switch. But the cost of storage is why a lot of physical releases for that system still require a sizable download. The larger capacity cards are expensive and cut into profits. Blu-ray is a much more cost effective solution. Even though the discs are a lot slower than Flash, you’re really only going to be transferring data off them once in a blue moon, as most consoles install games to internal storage now anyway. Flash only makes sense for something like the Switch, since it’s a portable, battery powered console. Thus it benefits from having as few moving parts as necessary.
Of course all of this is becoming moot as digital sales take over. Having the customer download the data is cheaper than any physical media, since there’s no shipping costs or retail overhead associated with it.
Uh, Nintendo Switch?
Discs are mass produced in factories, they cost pennies to make and they take seconds to be made (it’s like stamping a disc).
They’re easy to ship, either in paper/plastic envelope so super thin, easy to hide inside a paper manual or a small booklet, or you can put it in jewel case/box/whatever in a standardized size, again easy to ship.
An USB stick contains multiple parts (plastic case, metal connector, fiber glass circuit board, silicon chips like the flash memory chip and the controller chip).
Yeah there’s usb drives as small as a finger nail, but they still take time to be manufactured.
It takes more time to be programmed… you have to format the drive, test the flash memory cells and mark bad ones, then copy the information, check that the information was written correctly.
The drives can also be damaged by ESD … static electricity from your fingers getting close to the contacts inside the usb stick…. it’s super rare but it can still happen.
IF you make it super small, you may still have to use some bulky packaging .. imagine a finger nail sized usb stick flying around in a big Amazon box maybe getting stuck between the cardboard folds of the box and the person complaining the stick didn’t arrive. So, you end up with blister packs or big bulky packaging for the usb stick…
This thread would have made sense 8 years ago, it makes no sense today. Physical media will be phased out the same way headphone jacks on phones was, and the same way floppy disks were years and years ago. Nintendo may be an exception, but I don’t see Microsoft or Sony bragging about outdated usb drives replacing disks anytime soon. Once the game is installed on your console, what’s the point? Do you really want to have to keep a bunch of USB drives laying around? I lose them when I only have 1 or 2. You’d also be forced to keep the usb drive plugged into the console to play it, the same way you have to keep a disc in your console.
CD’s/DVD’s are cheap which maximises profits, USB’s would be great but to expensive, but ultimately what game publishers really want is all digital as that means more money direct to them, less expenses spent on physical media.
[removed]
Switch cartridges are essentially micro SD cards. Nintendo have more or less always flown in the face of standards and done their own thing. Even the micro CDs with the gamecube and Wii were different.
The **fixed cost** of an optical drive is of course much higher than the fixed cost of a USB port.
However, the **variable cost** of optical disks is much lower than the cost of thumb drives.
(EDIT: **At high volumes**, it is much cheaper to “press” the data onto disks at a factory, like how movies are currently put on DVDs.) If optical disk burners did not exist, then it would be cheaper to sell **low-volume** games on thumb drives. But optical burners **do** exist, so it’s almost as cheap to burn disks and then mail them out.
The others are right about the price, but you should consider that Nintendo does sell their games on what is essentially “usb drives.” They have constantly run into the issue of cost, though.
USB drives are much more expensive. They don’t seem like they’re that expensive, maybe $10 or so for one with the same storage as a blu-ray. But when you’re mass manufacturing, a single blu-ray disc costs pennies to produce. Shipping on USB drives would either increase the price of games or make less profit for the publishers.
Also, as we go into the next generation of consoles, USB drives won’t be fast enough. The SSDs that are going to be in next gen consoles wipe the floor with the speeds of a USB drive, so you’d have to install them to the SSD anyway.
Latest Answers