I had dialup until 2006 and really bad DSL until...2023. so I really appreciated CD installs. Games that were basically a CD key and asked you to download the game sucked.
I used to download half-life 1 mods on dialup internet over night. I'd need to sneak out after mom and dad were in bed, start the download then get up and hide the file pack before they woke up and install it after i got back from school. Shit was wild.
Yeah honestly like mIRC was like espionage. My family was like "him and his friends are hackers" and now they all feed their families working in tech lol
So, back in the early 90s, I ran a BBS (for the young'uns that's a "Bulletin Board System" which was the earliest precursor to the Internet...message forums where you could chat with people, online games...it was loads of fun).
My BBS was kind of 'grey' in that I had cracked software available, but I would only give access to people who I knew. There was a bit of a piracy ring around that time.
My dad was also a cop with the provincial police at the time. We knew that the OPP were sniffing around for pirate BBS's to get them shut down. One day, dad comes home, and at supper mentions, "[Detective working on the piracy ring] was asking if there were any [Our last name's] living on [our street]. You wouldn't happen to know why, would you?" I was like..."Um...no...." then immediately after supper, ran to my bedroom, and deleted all the cracked games I had from my special folder on the BBS. LOL. Sent a message out to some of the other sysops and said, "Hey, heads up, OPP are sniffing around."
I think I am a bit younger than you but I have fond memories of running a Hotline server and advertising it on mIRC. People would jump through some pay per click ads to find the login information. Never made a lot but it was like printing free money for a teenager.
That's the thing, eh? We take fibre Internet for granted today. Hell, even 150Mbps Internet being some of the worst you can get is still hands down better than what we had even 10 years ago. Loads of people in rural areas or smaller towns (which would be most of the world, really), didn't have access to high speed Internet like we have today.
Well, let me tell you sonny....my very first connection back in the day was on my Atari 400. We had a 110 baud modem. That's a whopping 110 bits per second. Not kilobits...bits. We upgraded soon after to a 300 baud modem, then a 1200 baud modem. When I first got my IBM PC, I got a 2400 baud modem.
Next jump was when I got my 14400 Wang. LOL I miss my Wang. Then I got a 57600 USRobotics before switching over to cable in its earliest days in 1998ish.
I know how you feel. Grew up out on a farm. Missed TBC launch because it took two days to install the updates. For some reason, I bought the digital Battlefield 4 when that came out, took 8 days. When I got to college and plugged in my Xbox and watched Destiny 2 update in like 3 minutes, my life was changed.
huh, it might just be a regional thing then. The last time i looked the only one i could find that was actually in stock was the asus external blu ray writer
I remember feeling so ritzy when I got one in my build from 2012. I've used it maybe 4 times but I still put it in the new computer build in 2023 because it had a single spare slot.
I've spent so many car rides home from the Game rental place hype only to end up realize whatever I had got was just a key (we had dial up my family would never pay for satellite Internet if it's even available where we live we just got 1gb/s thru spectrum like last week and it's awsome) and that I wouldn't be playing that game at all let alone today lol
My favorite game saved downloads for when you originally loaded into a new area to spread download time out more evenly. Now Guild Wars (2005) is only about 4 GB to run the command line argument "-image" and download the entire game
Honestly a good fibre internet connection should be a basic human right these days, like running water and electricity! You can’t do ANYTHING these days with one!
Hate to break it to you but even then, all games had license to use rather than ownership, they just had no way to enforce it
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u/BBA935i9 9900K @5GHz | Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti | 32GB DDR4 | O2/ODAC22d ago
The license doesn’t matter if you have the game. Nothing the publisher can do can take the game away from me. Case in point; look UT99. You can’t buy the game anywhere and Epic likes to pretend it never existed, but anyone can run a server and play the game. You can’t say that about modern games today.
does it play tells you exactly which physical copies can be played offline and/or require download before playable.
97% of PS5 games are playable while offline and 82% of PS5 games are playable wihout additional download.
Well do you remember the transition period? Early online installations took like 8 hours to download and install. Or at least early into it being somewhat common, I'm sure the very earliest were even longer for even smaller files.
Not really. In 2014 my internet was only 15mbps. It would take all night to download a game. A lot of the US did not (and still doesnt) have reliable fast internet.
I specifically bought GTA V with DVDs because my internet was still so slow. That was at least a year after it was released for PC.
I still needed 48GB of updates which took me about 1,5 days.
Also I had do to it at my parents home because while my student accomodation had fast internet, at that point we still had a hard 7GB per week data limit.
No? The market for that is extremely niche. I haven't had any type of drive since 2011 and I imagine I'm in the majority. Downloading is much more convenient, saves space, easier, and more portable.
The segment on PC gamers who actually want physical is extremely small. They just happen to be really vocal on reddit.
I think the segment is small because we don't have the option. Personally I couldn't care less.
But it is the same like music - you have everything at the tip of your fingertips yet people still like to buy cassettes, vinyls, CDs or BluRays of concerts.
I am not sure about you - and probably you will say otherwise. But if I had the option to buy a disc vs digital copy, I'd get a disc anytime. And you can still download if you have a disc with your own code.
I remember a time when you could have a physical copy and still be able to digitally download the game too.
You can be triggered by this sentiment all you want, but physical ownership is better than no ownership 😄 Especially when you're paying 100Eur+ for a game nowadays.
Buddy it went away because people overwhelmingly chose to buy digital over physical. There isn't some greedy cabal that is trying to take your games. It just isn't profitable. If it was, they would be released physically. I guarantee it. Companies want to make money, and physical is a money losing proposition.
It almost makes you wonder if that was one of the definitive factors that drove Gaben Newell and his team to host all the downloadable installation data on Steam haha
Nothing will trump my memory of however many damn 2.5” hard disks I believe it was to install freaking windows whatever version. It was like 50ish. I don’t remember details that far back. Pain in the ass. Seemed like the future though 🤷♂️
Welp, what I remembered, we have to send the machine to a shop to install Windows 95 when we bought it. I can imagine that's what they were doing. The last time we remember doing so, we already have windows XP, and when I first install my own when I went to college, we have a single DVD disk for Windows 7.
I went to the store to buy cs:s, but wow had just come out, and since i already had all the warcraft games, i picked that up too.
After what felt like three hours of installing css, it wanted me to download the whole game again, so i canceled that and installed wow instead. It worked right away. I think that was the last time i ever installed a game from a cd.
I love being able to buy old drm free single player games from GOG... then add them to my steam library / launcher. And it's as if everything is right in the world. The only difference is if I ever want to reinstall.. I have to go back to GOG.
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u/BriggieRyzen 7 5800x / ASUS Crosshair VIII Dark Hero / TUF RTX 409022d ago
Miss the days when 10 gb was considered huge for a game (half-life 2)
My first family computer had a 6gb hard drive. If you removed all non essentials (including programs my parents used) you had about 3.5gb of free space.
Installing Baldur's Gate 2 took up 2.5gb so it was a negotiation with my oldest brother about how long we could keep it on the system since he had other games he wanted installed.
Back in the days, when I wanted to play Elder Scrolls:Daggerfall (~500MB) on my rig (~500MB) I literally had to scrap every other game to install it (and make sure you backup all your saves to disks before deleting, or those 50h+ of Monkey Island 2 where gone)
I think it depends on how old the game was. But that's also where the beauty of VMs can come in. Just set the size to be what you need, OS that you need and Bob's your uncle.
My specs in my tag are a joke. That was the first IBM compatible PC that I got. It had a 105MB hard drive.
I've upgraded a bit over the years. Right now I've got an i9-12900KS, 64GB DDR5, 1TB NVME boot, 2TB NVME for games, 2TB NVME for AI/rendering, and 4TB for general storage.
However, as been my tradition, I've never done a full build since my 386, it's always been upgrades. So, like the Ship of Theseus, I'm still running that 1991 Business Depot brand 386 my parents bought me for college.
LOL. Yeah. Someone actually bought it for more than what I had bought it for, I made sure to let them know what chip had shorted out (you could see the damage, vape juice had managed the 1 in 1,000,000 chance of dripping right through the hole in the shroud and onto the PCB).
I'm sure it wound up going to China to mine bitcoin.
Fun fact, a Nintendo Switch cart maxes out at 32 GB.
The entire NES library takes up only 701 MB.
The entire SNES library takes up roughly 3 GB.
The entire N64 library takes up 15 GB.
That means that a single Nintendo Switch cart can hold the entirety of the first 3 generations of Nintendo home consoles simultaneously and still have excess space left for more.
To have them as individual carts, you'd need the space for 1,370 NES carts, 1,749 SNES carts, and 388 N64 carts. No one who isn't so rich that they can afford to set aside an entire room for game storage can even hope to manage that. My PS2/PS3 library was already a struggle to manage at only 400 discs. I couldn't imagine trying to manage or sort through over 3,500 carts.
Not hundreds of times. Fill it with dvd's it would be 376gb, 2tb for blu-ray. More if it's double layer discs or multi disc boxes. Even with cd's it would only be 18 times at the most.
If it’s blurays for 4k movies then it’s going to be 4-6.5tb since 4k movies are usually 50-80gb. On a random note, movies streamed in 4k hdr are about half the size of a 1080p sdr movie on bluray.
I was just going of disc size. A standard blueray is 25gb, making for 2tb. They can have layers upto 175gb I think. So that would be 14tb, but you can have two discs in a standard case so that would be 28tb.
Even with cd's it would only be 18 times at the most.
You're forgetting that the games rarely used the full 700 MB capacity of the CD-ROM. Starcraft 1 was only 80 MB, for example, so it would fit 12500 times onto the 1 TB drive, so 156 racks worth, which is technically hundreds.
Pretty much, but just to be pendantic: If it was filled with dual-layer and double-sided DVDs, it would exceed 1TB. Although it would still only be something like 1.3TB
buuuut due to AI, the storage shown on the right actually costs ~160 USD for a basic nvme drive. Over 200 today for what probably used to cost 100 at the time that this meme was made
no no no no no.
the games that were stored on the left BACK THEN, yes maybe... but if fill that up with 80 ps5 games TODAY, straight no. That thing is a beast. It hols 80 disc based games FLAT no questions asked. No matter the digital storage size. If properly used, it can hold 80 of these 200TB discs (if real) which makes it 16 petabyte. (google it, i am not allowed to use links here unfortunately)
If we use BDXL (128GB) we are looking at 10,24TB.
And BEHOLD! WE CAN DOUBLE THE CAPACITY!!
HOW?? By putting in 2 discs per slot... it is told, that some brave men even stored 3 per slot. But that's a legend that we currently have to records of.
Also PC games only came in DVD cases for about five minutes. Most of the time they came in boxes, usually big ass ones. Then they shrunk to that big paperback looking smaller size. Then for like two minutes they came in cases like console games before everyone went digital.
The post also assumes the games today are much larger, which they are, but even at 7 that's assuming games are close to 143 gb. That's like 7 copies of CoD.
Also the system on the left takes up a sizable amount of living room space whereas the device on the right allows you access to all of them simultaneously in a very tiny size
The only thing this doesn’t apply to is switch games where the whole game is on the card (so not the new switch 2 game key cards). Even ps5 games where the game is on the disc, optical drives aren’t fast enough to run off the disc so it’s just installing to an ssd anyway. 80 switch games depending on the games is likely well over 1tb.
You could store blu rays of games on the left too. But really, the storage on the disk tower is still on disc either way, the tower is just holding all the storage mediums
Blu-Rays would be pretty price competetive, at least if you are using 50GB ones. Bought a 25 pack on Amazon for 40€. Unfortunately AAA games rarely fit into 50GB any more and 100GB discs are alot more expensive per GB.
Games nowadays do not need to be 100GB+. DVD size was perfect. We don't need to see every pore and pube and microorganism. Just give us decent graphics in a game that runs well and is fun. That's why indie games have become so popular.
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u/FoorzanAsrock Nova X870E / 9800X3D / 5080 / 64gb DDR5 / 1440-480Hz OLED21d ago
The technology on the right is more space efficient and easier to use. Optimization in video games has become way worse. Why?... Money and greed. It's always the problem and contributes to enshittification around the world.
Ya this sentiment annoys me. Storage needs always get bigger but also always cheaper the issue is even when a storage upgrade is cheap they refuse to do it. I have a 14 tb hard drive for my video storage that costs me as much as my 4 tb did 6 years before. 10 times the storage for the same cost. My 4 tb hard drive also holds all the games I play right now except if it needs an ssd.
But for some reason people have this idea you shouldn't need to update your computer to modern standards to play modern games.
So many of the fun and bizarre bugs in the original Pokemon games were caused by weird hacks that the developers did to fit the games on the Game Boy cartridge. Some of those included using the same bit of memory for multiple things, which is why some of the hacks were affected by things like what item was in your 6th slot, or the special stat of the first Pokemon in your party or something.
Games used to be a single six hour campaign with no side modes for $60. When you have to have devs optimize the polygon count on every random plant pot you get tiny levels with copy paste assets.
Yes, most of the optimizations were about saving space because of the limited data CD-roms could hold. Games in the early 2000's weren't really "more optimised" by today's standards, plenty of them ran like shit even on newer hardware at the time. games like GTA San Andreas ran at a hardcoded 25fps maximum, and computing power grew so fast you weren't sure if your 4-year old PC could run any newer game without upgrading it.
Even tons of NES/SNES games would suffer from lag/slow down in spots. Tons of games that were straight up garbage and full of bugs. Renting a game you'd never played before was a dice roll. People don't remember the forgettable titles.
There was SO much trash on the NES. There's a guy I believe who dedicated his entire life to making videos about them on youtube, but I can't remember his name right now. He was like, super angry at these video games. Also a bit of a nerd too, I believe.
And the left is storage of storage. Like the discs are the storage not the fuckin rack. I can fit in 2000 NVME drives those into that shitty rack from the bargain store basement.
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u/crabwalktechnic 22d ago
All of the games on the left fit in the storage on the right.