When the cloud servers fail and your data is lost on what you have bought how are you going to like cloud then?

The more people start using cloud the more server stress there WILL be and a higher chance of server failure, data loss, hacks etc... Physical will ALWAYS be better than digital and especially cloud.

The future is not cloud. Cloud will play a big part in the future but we should NEVER just use the cloud.

Like UlF said in his comment"Streaming sucks". He is absolutely correct. At this rate the US will take 5+ yrs to get internet speeds fast enough to do good streaming for todays stuff. In the future more data will be required and the US is going farrr to slow at this rate to keep up.

If you lived in korea then streaming is perfectly fine.

the korean internet is too fast for me. the screen finishes loading to the next screen before my index finger comes off the mouse o_0;;

of course many of u havnt experienced it unless u went there to teach english or something.

Bad analogy.
With MP3's you can buy individual songs and music CD's area fraction of the cost of new games. Most people trade or sell their games once they have lost interest. There is no money in DD only. Once you purchase the game, you're stuck with it permanently.

This wont float with the majority of gamers and I don't see people wanting to wait long lengths of times to download the latest and greatest games.

Personally I like owning physical media and having the option to sell or trade what I paid my hard earned coin for. Besides, Comcast, Verizon, and other various broadband providers will cap bandwidth. In some areas they have already done so. I have received emails from Comcast warning me about my usage. Most infrastructures cant support this, especially in the U.S.

Besides, lets not forget the 800lb Gorilla in the room. There are still millions of people that game in areas where the only internet they have is still through dial up connections.

If they were eventually to go full DD it would be compressed to hell. What's the point of having nice gear (1080p displays, 5.1 or higher with high performance bit audio, etc) if it's all going to be compressed? Any HT nut will tell you there is a significant difference between compressed and uncompressed. Especially on the audio end.

While what you are saying is an issue now, have the option for dd for every game released on top of physical copies hurts no one. Also, you talk about the issues with DD today. I said the gen after this gen. Assuming new consoles aren't out until 2013, this means that the DD only consoles wouldn't be out till close to 2020. Can you really say that today's limitations would still be an issue in years?
I we all chose not to progress with the planning of tech because of limitations that are in place today, then we would never progress forward.
To your point though. From your perspective and preference, this would be bad. From console makers perspectives, the Music and Movie industry is the best test market for these things. It's already happened with music. It's happening very quickly with movies. Even PC has primarily turned into a DD only system. From their perspective, the majority of consumers will be OK with this. The ones who aren't will either stop playing games (yeah right) or change with the times. I bet you buy arcade and PSN games. This is a step in the DD direction.

There are benefits to DD. Higher revenue for developers which keeps them making games we all love. Helps them rationalize taking bigger risks for games too because they are making more money per sold copy. While I don't see it happening, it could be an argument for lower prices for games. Never having to get up to change disks for a new game you want to play. Also, as with steam and other DD on the PC, you could have the game already downloaded before it comes out. The day its released, you download a small key that takes a second that unlocks the game for you. This illuminates the long download time because it's all happening before you can even access the game.

There are solutions to your problems. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean the industry isn't heading in that direction.

It's not a matter of my not liking it. It's a matter of reality. The U.S. knows that a better infrastructure is needed but we wont have the ability to even start working on it until 2020 and that is "IF" we can rebound from the current world economy issues.

That is a big if considering just how bad things really are right now. It's 2011. I highly doubt that new infrastructure will even be under way until near the end of the generation you are talking about. It's reality, not personal preference. We are a good 10 to 20 years away from having the kind of infrastructure other countries already have.

Contractual agreements are not the same as “gentlemen” agreements. If you think that they work with their distributors a month before production then their entire business model is trash. They work with companies like nvidia constantly for building the graphics cards they need. They work with companies that build motherboards years in advance. This is what proper business planning does.

They are not buying components on a whim like a consumer. So again, considering the ram isn’t a singular module and is integrated into the motherboard I highly doubt they wouldn’t have a final schematic that they are supposed to be building around.

If they are delaying production another 3 years then it’s obvious again this is an after though project and is just trying to be responsive to their bad execution they had the last 14 years.

It also isn’t far fetched to use their failure to produce first party titles the last 7 years including the highly anticipated games I mentioned all being cancelled. That they would continue to you know… lie

Yeah with FSR 5 they should be able to offer a much cheaper version of Helix.

Series S is what has killed Xbox Series so... Will they dare?

The factors are largely external. Covid and Russia-Ukraine war causing inflation led to the first price increase in 2022.

Then we get Trump's tariffs increasing hardware prices, AI boom causing a RAM crisis, war on Iran causing a worldwide fuel crisis which impacts the cost of everything.

Gaming doesn't exist in a vacuum. The last few years have been a shitshow and lot of it was definitely avoidable.

LucasRuinedChildhood,

For sure. No disagreement on the external factors doing a lot of this. Where I have to gently push back however is on two fronts:

1. The pandemic definitely caused some issues: asynchronous development was a big issue and really complicated timelines and affected game quality. At the same time, when it comes to price hikes, it's really difficult to know what was genuine necessity and what was taking consumers for a ride. The pandemic brought about "stag-flation" which was increasing prices and stagnant wages, which was a problem caused by supply chain constraints. There was also "Greed-flation", where companies that were slightly affected or had no issues took advantage of the situation and squeezed everyone citing supply chain issues when there were none.

2. It's definitely true that the tariffs, AI boom, and RAM crisis were all things enabled by tech broligarchs throwing money at this caricature of a world leader, one of them being Satya Nadella. I don't think Sony and Nintendo have contributed much to this problem if at all, but Microsoft's Nadella I feel was instrumental in causing every one of those issues. Microsoft as a company contributed to both candidates (though they gave Harris 4x as much if I recall), but Nadella was all in on letting AI run wild. He paid for unregulated AI, and got a war that's not a war (even though Trump called it that at least five times on television) that screwed up helium access. So for me, I feel that one of the players in the gaming industry is a key architect of these issues, and for that reason I struggle a bit to think of it as "external".