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Comment by gamepsys | Hacker News Reader

My favorite part is that installing games from the internet is technically more expensive for Sony than installing a game from the disc, because they pay a larger network transfer costs.

Is there some spyware involved? Is this just incompetence? Is there another reason for this design?

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Someone probably just assumed it would be better user experience not having to patch after install. That just doesn't work out when the user's network isn't as good.

I think _in general_. Games are stupid big now.

I'm amazed we're still on discs as physical media and not usb keys. Speed (), size, and capacity would all be greatly improved. It would be a bit like the cartridges of old.
I guess it must be a cost thing.

USB3.0 can theoretically do a 25GB blue ray in 50 seconds, 3.1 is half that, and 3.2 half again.

At one point, I know neither Microsoft or Sony deployed patches as binary diffs. Depending on what assets get patched, it might be faster to download the latest available version instead of installing from local disc and then patching to current as the "patch" may be similar size to fresh install.

unless the game is legit unplayable from disc, you can get players into the game and download it in the background.

It's not incompetent or even more expensive if you assume network bandwidth is a fixed cost.

Why would we assume network bandwidth is a fixed cost? Everyone pays for network transmissions.

Kind of, but not that simple. You can pay for contracts where you commit to using x PB of traffic over some period at a heavily discounted rate or agreed amount, then pay extra over that. You can even have commitments, where if you don't use as much as you promised, you pay penalties for the difference. In edge cases, it becomes cheaper to waste some bandwidth in a given month/quarter.

Press 1 million discs, sell 500k discs. Price of those 500k unsold discs is several million dollars. Pressing discs is a huge risk. Don't press enough and you lose sales. Press too many and you lose money. Online has no such issues.

> Is there another reason for this design?

Ah, but if Sony uses the disc drive to install the game then they might have to pay royalties to whichever soul-sucking, rent-seeking company owns the rights to the blu-ray format, whoever they are.

So, Sony.

People have already forgotten the Blu Ray vs HDDVD format roles huh...

Perhaps I should have made my sarcasm more obvious. :P

It's funny you say that as the whole reason the Xbob 360 used HD-DVD was to avoid paying Sony the royalties for Blu-Ray.

>Xbob 360

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

I'm sorry, this was too good an opportunity to pass up.

Sony was always heavily involved with optical discs, like Qualcomm is with phone modems. 44.1kHz sampling rate of audio CD famously comes from components reused from one particular Sony product that predates CD.

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