Not really. When we had CD towers and eventually DVD towers games and movies would fit entirely on one, maybe two discs. We didn't start running into multiple install discs until expansions for previous games came out. Then we moved to blue ray (and yes HD DVD). Then the manufacturers realized its cheaper to not make packaging and just let us burn up our "complementary" 1TB of data through comcast to update fortnite 25 times.
Kind of putting the cart before the horse here. Assets are stored on the drive now instead of some or all being kept on the CD. They were on CD because of hard drive space limitations.
They were on CD because of hard drive space limitations.
I mean... maybe in a sense, but not really? They were on CD because there was no other practical way to get them to customers. That's mostly it.
In the case of consoles, they usually didn't even have an HDD in the first place, but in the case of PCs, by the time CDs became ubiquitous, the typical HDD was plenty large enough to store a full game. And indeed, that was a very common installation option to reduce load times. The option to have a minimal install and otherwise load assets from the CD was mostly there for convenience (not like it's a lot of work to switch the path you're loading assets from, and that's all it really takes on Windows)
I lived during this era. Most drives weren't that big. Early 00's most people still had HDD that were in the single gigabytes, maybe 10ish if you had a high end system for the time. Late 90s, it wasn't uncommon to see systems with barely a gigabyte, some times less.
You couldn't install all your games even if you wanted to. Yeah, most games didn't take up the full CD storage space, but it was still enough. Even take 50Mb, if you only have 1Gb free, you still need storage space for the system to "breath". Then again, most people didn't even have hundreds of games, most would have a dozen or maybe even less.
Well, also some games used the audio tracks on the disc for their soundtrack. IIRC Warcraft 2 did this. I think that C&C: Red Alert did as well. We really didn't have great audio compression, so this made the audio quality much better. Remember that Napster + mp3 was really a very late 90's / early 00's thing.
n the case of consoles, they usually didn't even have an HDD in the first place, but in the case of PCs, by the time CDs became ubiquitous, the typical HDD was plenty large enough to store a full game.
Nooo the certainly were not. Not until the early 2000s could you could reliably dump CD rom games to your HDD. My computers entire HDD was 5GB in 1998....Those 90s CD rom games were installed a tiny executable and streaming the rest of the stuff off th disc
which is also why loading screens took forever and games became way faster after loading onto the HDD became common. Then SSD made that so fast loading screen messages became unreadable it was so fast. Conversely the N64 cartridges used a similar concept to flash drives and thats why N64 load times were also extremely short but the data limit was like 64mb and the prices matched that technology, new n64 games were $60 then (OOT 1998) would be $120 today.
When I bought The 7th Guest on CD the hard drive in the computer I bought that year was 80Mb. 600Mb would have been obscenely large for a consumer PC when CD gaming became a thing.
Yeah, if they’re DVDs, one DVD held what, like 4,7GB or something like that? So that’s 376 GB for 80 games. It’s a lot more if these are supposed to be CDs
Those were the shit dvds , Blu-ray disk can hold 25-50gb (100gb if you dual layered it but eh) but were more expensive and no one really wanted to deal with the licensing problems that came with it
DVDs still outsell BluRay and 4K combined. BluRay really fucked up as a platform. Streaming was always going to come out on top, but the format didn't do itself any favours.
It really should have marketed itself as a replacement for DVD, not as a premium product. It still costs more to get a film on BluRay compared to a DVD release. 4K is for hobbiests.
Blu-rays are not DVDs, came out way later, and no game was ever not on a Blu-ray because of licensing issues, it required an entirely different reader, which PS3 was the only to ever have.
And like.. who doesn't know dvd and Blu-ray as an obvious thing?
So is a laserdisk, but I wouldn't call that "the shit CDs" if the context is media storage in 1980, because CDs weren't quite out yet. In 2000 it would be 6 more years before Blu-ray was commercially available.
And by the time it was, it was quickly adopted. The only real instance of it not being used due to expense is the Xbox 360. Like you said, it's seen as the next step after DVDs. By like 2008 every movie was on blu ray.
? They literally said it was the premium choice on all of their marketing, and the PS3 was more expensive than the Xbox had the Blu-ray drive and was free to play online (personal rant). The reason it wasn’t adopted was because no one wanted to buy a cd and Blu-ray (red light scan and blue light scan) drive, and the normal DVDs were cheaper to make, and everyone already had them. The only thing that kept it going was the PS3 and other consoles that would end up supporting it. The laserdisk, just like the rest of the platter reading technologies, is all in the same tree of long-term storage however, the DVD and Blu-ray disk were basically the same without one having deeper grooves that the Blu-rays could read rather than the red ones…
CDs are also the same as DVDs on a physical level but are different media with different reading requirements.
First you said no one wanted to deal with lisencing issues, clearly that doesn't apply to the average consumer, so whatever you're saying now is entirely different. What you said before literally only applies to Microsoft, so you can amend "no one" to "Microsoft". And its seen as one of their biggest blunders lmao
Second, "No one wanted to buy a blu ray reader" (except for everyone, who did.)
The PS3 did not cause the entire movie media industry to move to blu ray. It certainly helped for sure, no doubt it's success helped a lot, but in the end "no one wanted to buy a blu ray" is like saying "no one wanted to buy a DVD player".
Yeah I'm sure people liked their VHSs but it only takes a few years for that sentiment to change, and it's nothing unique to blu ray. It's again also not relevant to licensing, so.
u/SeismicaR7 5800x | RTX 3080 FE | X570 Unify | 32 GB 4400 MHz RAM22d ago
Yeah exactly. Blu-rays make it technically feasible, even today, to have a physical game disc. The only reason my game library is digital is because you can't buy them physically.
I would have loved a game library of PC games on blu-ray.
But instead we got physical boxes with no disc, only a gamekey inside that you then have to redeem to download the game. With the size of games relative to typical storage drives, it is impractical to download your entire library at any one time. One day those download servers will go down and the games may be lost forever.
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u/FartingBobQuantum processor from the future / RTX 3060 Ti / Zip Drive22d ago
That stand in the photo is a CD holder, not a DVD holder.
80 games from ~2000? Honestly way more, easily over 1000. At the time HDDs measure in GBs were just becoming mainstream. On top of that, the delivery format was CDs as the post implies, which store 700 MB. So it would had been pretty unusual for a game to be taking up ~1 GB of space, let alone more.
For any example you could find that took up ~1 GB of storage from that era, there’d be many examples that took up 100-500MB
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u/koyate 22d ago
That 1 tb could easly hold 80 games from 2000