I just hope all the kids in here realize that twenty years from now you are going to be getting asked countless stupid questions akin to the ones you ask us older gamers now. :P

Such as:
"What is a ROM?"
and
"Are they ever going to make Half-Life 4?"

Terabytes in size would be a large push/selling point that streaming will be better, since you don't need a dedicated harddrive for a single game.

And i remember playing Morrowind and Diablo 2 with a computer with 6Gb hard drive in 2002... Had to choose one or the other...

Uggg... i hope there's a mandatory class that tells the basics of technology, like what a floppy disk is, general sizes and advances in computers, the differences of 8bit and 32/64/128bit computers, maybe even have them use an Apple 2 and do a BASIC program so they get an idea of how far things have come.

Please don't reply to me.
I still haven't forgiven your bullshit about how I probably gave myself cancer.
Just put your tinfoil hat back on and go away. I'm sure there is some inane conspiracy you can pull out of your ass and parade around with.

If you wish to be butthurt (for some odd reason) then fine.

I'm just replying accordingly to the topic at hand. If you hate that, then ignore it. It's not like i'm going out of my way to find your comments just to reply to them. Or downrank them.

Some reason?

You told me I deserved to get cancer :P

But like I said, don't reply. Just leave me alone Alex.

That you deserved a disease...

As a matter of principle I don't curse or tell people that they should die or get X/Y/Z disease.

Sorry i'm pressing F to doubt.

LOL

1 & 2: Hyperbolic and not too likely, imo.....streaming needs good infrastructure and not every area has it or will be able to have it, and hundreds of clients sounds a bit stretching it.

3: Games will probably peak at a certain size outside of VR games with immersion/etc.

4. Good. I would hate having to learn a new OS. :)

5. People will mock what is worth mocking, unless the gov't/corps clamp down on such 100%..this is human nature.

6. Tbh I never got why people more and more have debit cards and the like yet still steam cards are a thing.

7. People will grow to love epic until it tanks due to no more exclusives and not enough money from fortnite and other subs to keep it afloat...that is my prediction.

8. We had a disc made that could hold 1TB, actually...it never made it to the mass production stages, iirc.








Ignore him....he thinks he owns the forums and no one can reply to him under penalty of law or some such.

Mhmm... I've defaulted to how i replied years ago before he got the stick up his ass.

Anyways, back to the discussion.



But with HD streaming, and soon 4K streaming, said streams take up far more bandwidth than actually having downloaded the data. Plus streaming uses the weakest of Mpeg4 compression to make it fast, to make it actually compact and efficient (1/2 the space or less for same quality) would take considerably longer to encode.

I remember when the suggested DVD size was suppose to be 24Gb, effectively what the Blueray is now. The comparison was using a highly dense CD like for a US area uncompress phone books for every town/city, and something like 34 CD's on a single disc.

And i wonder what happens when the 'whales' get tired of paying out the ass and leave... :P

I still see with Epic as competition to possibly improve the landscape as useful, however hard to tell with them making certain moves. Would really depend on if/when Valve reacts, and if Epic would calm down.

As for the 1Tb media, well when it's available you know the first thing they will use it for, is 360 degree 4k VR porn :P

After that, movies and games.... and backups....

Who knows....maybe they will never leave 100%(you can always find a sucker or someone willing to buy some stuff).

===================

1TB discs would be nice but minute damage or scratches would likely mess a good amount of data. Flash drives are getting higher capacity but are still a bit pricey....same with portable HDDs.

You are likely right about the pron, though.

The denser the data, the more error detection/correction that is implemented.

I remember seeing a demo of where they explained (and showed) you could drill a hole (of a specific size or smaller) in an audio cd, and the CD would still play properly because there was enough error detection/correction to fix it.

Though every scratch would have more data it could affect you will need more correction to counter those effects making the raw data you could store, a bit less.

In twenty years, this good infrastructure may have taken the time to exist. The corporations have enough money to throw at building several decent PCs to make up for the current specs, they may have enough power to tell the companies developing for them to OPTIMIZE THEIR GAMES for their own PCs, etc. The question remains if the internet companies will actually make streaming less of a worry with new internet plans that are fast enough for streaming and unlimited to encompass this streaming. Given all these hurdles are taken care of (which aren't hard with the amount of money the companies pushing game streaming hold), it's not far off to think that the worst is coming. And while you may be OK with them giving options for how to experience games, they typically just want one option to prevail and the rest to die out, naturally that option is the one that works in their favor, not yours. Hi streaming.

Peak? Heh, I see no end. Game sizes will continue rising and rising. When 8K is now a trending term, companies will do 8K textures, and when it's 16K, they will do 16K textures. Some have the foresight to ship the game in 1080p or less textures then offer the higher resolution textures, some don't. Or some add excessive amounts of content to their game. At launch, GTA V was like 65GBs on PC. Now it's over 80GBs. No graphical improvements happened between then and now. All that happened is the Online portion being crammed with stuff. By the way, you can't opt out of receiving updates for Online if you're playing the game for its Story Mode/singleplayer. Nadda.

Linux would have proliferated more by then, maybe enough to dwarf the Mac OS market share, but I fear that this New Linux would be nothing but Valve's own playground. Thus, if you switch from Windows to Linux, you probably changed from Microsoft to...Valve. Yeah, like hell.

And in twenty years later, what will be mocked isn't what is mocked today. I do hope I am wrong, but there's nothing indicating that people won't laugh at those few old farts who think lootboxes are the evil of games. Here we are, years later after Steam happened, if you argue about DRM, you get weird looks. If you argue against clients, you're the old fanatic who's obsessed with his icon filled desktop (even if it only has the icons to This PC and Recycle Bin only). Complaining about microtransactions? Can't pay $5 to get that cool weapon? What are you, a freeloader?

Some people don't have debit cards, but have cash. Or you're a kid and can't legally get a card. Gift cards are great for this scenario. Gift cards are also good for gifting, as their name implies, and in this case, it doesn't matter if you have debit or cash.

By then, Epic will have enough sales going on organically as a result of their store. Their exclusivity deals would have boosted them to be even better than GOG at selling stuff. By that point, they need not to worry much. The developers would either release on Epic only WILLINGLY (no exclusivity deals) in order to make full use of the %88 cut, or simply just tell people on social media to buy on Epic, it supports them MOOORE and you can't make your beloved developers less rich, riiiiiiiight?

The fun part is, even if it got to mass production and was ridiculously affordable, 1TB would not bring back physical PC games. They'll at best be used for a cinematic push, or as a cheap yet densely packed storage solution, but PC games? Nah, they're dead, go digital or go bust.

In the next 10 we are heading for global recession. If it can be considered the push for capital has lead to cardboard cutout sequels to successful franchises with a focus on iterative detail rather than costlier ai or creativity then we have a necessary death for the AAA industry spurred on by the millenial shareconomy.
People have an ingrained need to socialise so there will be continued push for esports as a way of monetizing peer pressure.
Unfortunately we have to transition to a more socialist system as capitalism dies and that will most likely take at first the form of the living wage as governments shift focus to AI streamlining.
Perhaps this will mean a game will be developed where community groups are tasked with plug and playing AI robotics as a form of team sports akin to at first like robot wars; transitioning to other genres (think more like factorio).
As people become less necessary and more idle therefor they will become more creative as a form of escapism, which will be hampered by latent psychology (humans that fail to thrive become depressed).
We will no doubt fail to act swiftly enough to address the growing needs of both climate change and the complex economic & civil realities of the next generation.
Hyper inflation, very little money and unrealistic expectations for half arse work.
In the best case scenario the industry breaks down leaving grass roots indies who would produce for no other reason than their own personal drive to rather than the fiscal rewards as communities nationalise and slowly come to cope with a sense that they (unlike in the modern day) will have to look after their own.
Slowly civil works will bring society back out of the dark ages and advances in less hardware intrinsic approaches will bring back a focus on gameplay to meet the growing social need to feel (games based around experiences).
My hope is that we can get back on track enough as societies that science and technology can start moving forward towards portless magnetic neural stimulation headsets with bone conduction VR that can trick your brain into thinking it can smell see hear and feel the gaming experience.
This will no doubt be an elite service and most likely be for a long time an arcade like service.
More realistically though we will see a drive for community based entertainment perhaps a crowd interactive projection model.
Imagine bringing your local community together for a murder mystery on the orient express where clues are projected on the ground around them and taken with them by qrcode scanning from phone. Individuals mincing to express their collective idea's, work out puzzling issues or try and throw off others if they think they might be on the right path.
The necessity of moving from a system of isolating/polarizing winners and losers capital base to a socialist one will have a profound effect once the inherent opoosition is driven out by the reality that people will need to live within their means and the confines of our planet well before we can effectively harvest our solar system.

PC, personal computer gaming was almost killed by CD DRMs then by net DRM such as Steam.
DRMs killed the CD/DVD stores, then Steam tried to consolize the PC, making it like a Macintosh.
I really thank GOG who helped us resisting this big failure of computer gaming.
Without GOG, there almost couldn't be good pc games. We see that pc games since editors made them exclusives through Steam, are not very good.
An example is Medieval 2 Total War: After this game, no TW game, which all became Steam-only, was made to be moddable as free and complete than Med2. Players are still waiting for at last a Medieval 3 Total War, as freely moddable than Med2 still is, with its excellent mods such as Third Age. This may never come, if Sega still want to sell bad games to sell DLCs as players can't mod them like they want, mods being DRMed by Steamworks.
So, if you want good pc games, stop buying at Steam stores and other DRMed companys.

Good info...thanks for all that.