When new players grow up in the digital age, optical discs and optical drives driven by the feelings of old players will lose their necessity.
What is the hottest in the game circle recently? "The Last of Us 2" absolutely did my part. It sold 4 million copies within 3 days of launch, setting a new first-party game sales record for PS4. However, there was a huge controversy that followed. The gap between a player rating as low as 4.6 and a media rating as high as 94 also pushed this game to the forefront. The momentum of
even surpassed the PlayStation 5 recently released by Sony. PlayStation has sold more than 400 million cumulative sales in the 25 years since its birth, making it the best-selling home game console brand ever. And this time the digital version of PS5 became Sony's first game console to cut off the optical drive, which naturally attracted heated discussions.
There is a sentence in "Dream of Red Mansions", which is the shareholder's wind
, "As long as family matters, either the east wind has suppressed the west wind, or the west wind has suppressed the east wind." In the last century, floppy disks were definitely the most popular portable storage devices until I still have a few of them at home. However, the commonly used 3.5-inch floppy disk has a capacity of only 1.4MB, and the access speed is slow and unstable. Later, larger and more stable optical disks appeared. Of course, this shareholder style has overwhelmed the floppy disk's westerly wind, and optical drives have also become desktops and notebooks. Standard.
as a physical game carrier, the breakthrough of optical discs is slightly difficult. In the 1980s and 1990s, the and Nintendo became the absolute hegemon in the game field with the best-selling FC and SFC. However, the "Royalty" and "Consignment Production Fee", which accounted for 30-35% of the game price, made third-party game companies miserable. . When it was about to enter the era of optical discs, Nintendo, which started to develop N64, and its partner Sony turned against each other, so Sony, which first set foot in the game industry, decided to develop its own console. Unlike Nintendo, Sony vigorously supports third-party game companies, and third parties that have been suffering from Nintendo have developed games for PS. The PS, which uses optical discs as the game medium, has a larger capacity, and the large quantity and high-quality games make it a winner in the next-generation console battle. Later, Sony’s game consoles all used optical discs, and even PSPs also used smaller UMDs, so optical drives became indispensable hardware.
Even Nintendo Wii also used CDs
Yesterday Dongfeng, today Xifeng
, even if you don’t play games, you can still notice from your computer. It turned out to be a necessary optical drive. Nowadays, no matter what size laptop, it almost disappears. Traces, even people who are and may not install the optical drive. After all, except for departments with extremely high security requirements, CDs are really useless for ordinary users.
Picture from Visual China
Compared with the public who are accustomed to notebook computers without optical drives, the acceptance of game consoles without optical drives is not so high. Although Yusanjia game consoles have long been able to download digital versions of games, they have always retained the optical drive. It wasn't until the release of Microsoft's pure digital version of Xbox One S last year that the optical drive was completely out of the game for the first time. This year Sony did not want to lag behind to remove the optical drive on the digital PS5.
Why remove the optical drive? Behind this is of course the votes cast by the majority of players every time they buy a digital version of the game. In an interview, Sony Interactive Entertainment President Jim Ryan also said that many consumers of only buy digital products. Since this is the case for the , it doesn't seem like a bad idea to sacrifice the optical drive in exchange for a thinner body and lower price. Where is the best digital version of
? For players, in addition to the low price, downloading digital games is much faster than the express delivery time of physical games. After opening members on various platforms, not only will they have exclusive game libraries, but they can even receive games for free every month. Rounding up is making money. For manufacturers, although the price of the digital version is slightly lower than the physical version, it only needsIf the platform is divided, the benefits are actually higher.
is not just a game
but is this really enough to make the optical drive disappear from the game console?
is like the older generation’s distrust of online payment. Players who come from the physical game era can only have that real sense of "acquisition" when they hold a compact disc. They see the game on the table. The sense of accomplishment of rowing is not comparable to a virtual game library. As a derivative of physical games, second-hand transactions between players are also impossible with the digital version. After a game loses its freshness, whether it is to exchange games with other players or directly sell "recover blood", it is colder than digital games. It's better to lie in the game library. For digital players, unless the whole "change the door", from Sony to Microsoft or Nintendo, even the console and the account are sold together, otherwise the money to buy the game is equivalent to a waste.
In addition to games, some gamers also use game consoles to play Blu-ray audio and video discs. The PS series has always attached importance to optical drives. The Blu-ray playback function of PS3 even impacted their DVD sales.
Image from zavvi
Ten years ago, Sony performed similar operations to the digital version of PS5 on PSP go, canceling the UMD optical disc drive that lasted for many years. Users can only store and access games through their own 16GB storage and online game store. . But for gamers in 2009, many UMD game discs accumulated through hard work have been completely scrapped, and they have to endure the server speed that is not fast enough when downloading online games, plus 16GB seems not small and practical but not enough. The storage space, all kinds of unsuitability make players complain.
Ten years later, when the physical version of the game is declining, and the digital version of the game is popular, faster download speeds and larger storage space seem to make Sony not repeat the mistakes of the year, and the dual version also gives users enough The choice space, all of this seems to be a matter of course.
However, for the old players who came from the era of Sega Saturn and the original PlayStation, the game is almost equated with the CD. Every time you open the thick CD package, you seem to see that the CD was put into the CD drive carefully. Yourself.
However, when new players grow up in the digital age, CDs and CD-ROMs driven by the feelings of old players will lose their necessity. Even cloud games are challenging the status of game consoles, and the possibility of staying in the hearts of players forever There are only memories, right?
author: Wang Sydney
This article first choice for geeks, geeks Jun reprint please contact micro letter geekparker. More reading
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