New data shows that physical software dollar sales dipped to an all-time July low of $85 million in the US — the worst total since tracking began in 1995.
  • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    58·
    5 days ago

    Huh. The AI slop image shown on the post doesn’t appear at the link. Weird. I wanted to see more detail. From here it looks like a giant Wii that takes Laserdisc. The implication is obvious: games are getting too big for optical discs, so let’s use a bigger disc. Only Laserdiscs didn’t hold more than CDs or DVDs despite being the size of vinyl records.

    While LaserDisc carried analogue signals (and held around 60 minutes per side — so, naturally, most which had movies were double-sided), the later LV-ROM data format held 3.28GB, way less than the 4.7GB advertised for DVD, which the Wii took (however, the Wii famously could not play DVD movies due to not including the video codec).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserDisc

    Of course, the issue is density, not disc size. CD and DVD are the same size, and hold 700MB and 4.7GB, respectively. Blu-ray is also the same size, and holds 25GB per layer, and holds up to 4 layers (however, only one side of a Blu-ray can be used, while DVDs can be flipped and the other side can be used).

    So if you took BD-ROM tech and made it on a bigger disc, you’d naturally have more space. But then you run into another issue. With Blu-ray, you’re jumping between layers, and from the inner ring to the outer ring. This makes data retrieval slow. If you make the disc bigger, you’re doubling to tripling the capacity, but load times would go way, way up, as accessing stuff on the bottom layer on the inner ring would be nearly as fast, but accessing stuff on the farthest outer ring would take much longer.

    No one’s really proposing LD-sized Blu-rays for gaming. The image is AI slop. AFAIK there weren’t even any vertically loading LaserDisc players.

    …getting on topic, I only buy digital when it’s cheap. Usually you can get the physical game for much less secondhand.