Could the PS4 Slim be a digital only console without a disc drive?
Our recent post on how to fix your PS4 Blu Ray drive got me thinking about my own use of the PS4 disc.
When was the last time I used my PS4 Disc drive? As a matter of fact, the only time I had to ever use my PS4 Blu Ray drive was when it started failing and I had to follow the steps above to make it stop doing its awful noise. Yup, the only time I had to insert a Disc in my PS4 was to try and fix the Disc Drive which had broken for no reason and had become extremely noisy.
I have moved on to a full digital experience on my PS4. I do not watch Blu rays or DVDs anymore, instead I use Netflix and Amazon Video. I have not bought a physical game for my PS4 yet, I rely a lot on digital games, but even more on my PS+ subscription for my gaming needs.
I realize digital’s not for everyone. It artificially inflates the prices of video games as you cannot buy used games, and some people live in areas where downloading a 50GB game is not necessarily convenient (although to be honest here, just have a little patience: my 7Mb Centurylink ADSL does the job well. It’s not as awesome as the 1Gb Fiber I had back in Tokyo, but it’s still acceptable if I’m OK with not playing the game right here, right now – I now, instant gratification takes a hit…). And for many gamers, the physical object is a must have to build a really cool collection of games.
I don’t have good numbers of how much of the market digital games represent. A few studies here and there seem to say that digital games already represent 15% to 20% of the gaming market. That’s quite a lot.
Based on these numbers, it would make sense if Sony came up with a version of the PS4 that doesn’t have a disc drive at all. This would be an easy way to reduce the size and weight of the device without have to spend too much on R&D to shrink other components.
Update: I got a comment on N4G stating that Sony doesn’t want another PSP Go. This is a fair point, but I’d say that this was then, and this is now. The PSP Go was out 6 years ago. The digital market has dramatically evolved since then. Also, the PSP go was a portable console with no 3G chip. It was technically not the best device for a “full digital” system (keeping in mind that people who owned a PSP Go tended to love the device!) . The PS4, on the other hand, is used to its full potential only when it’s constantly connected. There is a growing number of gamers that go digital only, compared to 6 years ago.
I’m also not pretending that the disc version of the PS4 would entirely disappear, but I can imagine a world where Sony market two versions of the console, the “digital only” one being slightly cheaper.
Are you still mostly “physical”, or did you make the switch to “digital”. Do you think a disc-less PS4 would make sense?
i only have 3 ps4 games. 1 physical and 2 digital. the reason i bought the physical was because it was on sale for 6$. ps4 slim without disc drive would be great and small. in my opinion you should be able to buy an extention to but on top of the s4 which plugs into the two usb ports (maybe the ps4 slim should have usb 3?) so it has enough power. then there should be an extra usb port on the disc drive.
I buy digital for games I know I will play for a long time. Games that will be useless in a year, like sports games, I buy physical. This is mainly due to the fact that they close down servers about 18 months after release.
Physical until hacked. Then mod and dump to hard drive, storing physical games away.
As a PC gamer my game collection has been digital for a long while now with 10 years spent on steam, i dont even actually own an optical drive anymore and i think consoles are eventually going to follow this, its one of those inevitable future changes that people are just going to have to adapt to, although i dont think that change is coming in this generation, as much as i sympathise with those on slower connections this is the way the world is going and sometimes big steps need to be taken in order to force the hands of ISP’s to upgrade their infrastructures :/
The idea of going digital is great but its really hard to compare digital PC market to the digital console market. Due to the nature of the PC it allowed for easy transition to digital. If you want to play a game that came out 5 years ago, you can because only the oldest of PC games are non-compatible (and even that can be fixed) So there is a huge selection of games that Steam can put on sale for dirt cheap and you’ll buy. Sony has no backwards compatibility with the PS3 and unless I misunderstood, the PS2 backwards compatibility is from repurchased digital PS2 games. I think they would want to keep a CD slot around for the soul idea of the possibility of backwards compatibility with older content.
Another issue is that they have marketed systems are “media systems” so not only are they meant to be used for video games, but they want sell them to people who might not play many games but maybe they have kids or something and are in the market for a bluray player. With 4K video coming up in the next few years and the sheer size of 4K content, it’ll be another push to look at your PS4 as not just a gaming system but a 4k bluray player as well.
Here in middle East, ps4 without a *** driver is not a good idea, simply downloading 50 GB game is impossible because of our bad speed of the Internet,so plz don’t Mack a ps4 slim, how about ps5.
I’m about half and half. Half physical games, half digital games.
Good morning and Merry Christmas to all. I would love to get a chance to be a blogger. I want to share my journey in the psvita hacking scene. No one knows my name and my username has never claimed any fame in the hacking scene.
That being said, I have been working extensively on hacking many consoles, most notably, the psvita. I guess you could call me a shadow hacker, one that, just like mist, remains invisible in the darkness. Its time, I believe, so shed some light on my work and let my presence be known. (You cannot believe how hard it is to get a reply back from someone big in the scene when no one knows how credible you are). My first post will be about the thought process that one has to go through to get a starting point in exploiting the psvita. Second will highlight a lot of my findings, including a very neat little trick on the latest 3.55 firmware. I won’t be going into details, as a lot of research is still being done right now, by myself and others, using this trick. I will on the other hand give enough hints for the readers to challenge themselves. If you can solve it, you deserve to use it I guess, I simply ask of anyone, to not publicly share. If a new update were to come out because of a leak, that would be everyone’s loss.
Please contact me by email for more info.
Sincerely,
Sh4d0w
Nobody cares until its done.
The proof is in the pudding.
I would love to go full digital, but there are two huge problems with it.
1.Price, new game on PSS 259PLN, new game in a store 199PLN.
2. The PSN management is abysmal, the store is a joke and the download list broken with no filtering, i have close 1500 things on my list games, demos, themes ect. and i have to scroll thorough it all to get something.
Other then that i use digital or stream services where i can, still waiting for NETFLIX here. :/
If they’d just organise all the DLC in a fashion that doesn’t make the online store look like it’s directory is held responsible by a twelve year old, then it might actually be worth scrolling through your digital downloads list to replay titles.
I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one that isn’t happy with the playstation store or PSN’s management
I own 1 physical PS4 game… GTA V, which I only have because someone gave it to me. I own 26 digital PS4 games 😛 I would *LOVE* a disc-less digital only PS4. I have 100mbps internet, so it’s not a problem to wait 25 – 40 minutes to download a game (Even though on PSN it can sometimes take 5 hours to download a single game due to their weak-*** download servers)
I only have 2mb connection so i still go physical except for the ps+ games
I’m in two minds about the whole digital download/streaming revolution. It’s so heavily dependent on a good internet connection, as was mentioned in the blog post. If you lose your internet connection while you’re using your PS Now service, you lose whatever you were playing until it comes back up. Digital downloads isn’t as bad, but if you’re getting poor speeds be prepared for a long wait. Remote scheduling helps a bit but 30-50GB is still a LOT of space and a couple of those will take whatever remaining space exists after installing any disc games on a stock 500GB console hard drive.
I still think standalone is best. But even then, there will often be huge patches to download to correct the bugs which weren’t remedied upon release. And the console itself needs updating. The trap that used to happen on my Xbox 360 would be, I wouldn’t use it for a few weeks and then the next time it was on both the system software and the game would need updating. By the time both were done and it had rebooted a couple of times, maybe moaned at you to verify your contact details and/or renew your subscription – twenty minutes or more later, I’d already be doing something else. Completely takes the fun out of it. It was never like this in the cartridge days… you just put it in, turned it on and it booted instantly. Sometimes you’d need to blow the dust out of the cart or the console, but mostly that was the only problem 😉
Personally I’d say it’s nice to have the DLC option especially if there’s a game you suddenly find and want to play at midnight when no store near you will be open and it usually loads faster off the drive than the disc, but no physical copies means eventually when the console/drive dies and the network hosting the downloads dies it’s gone.
I prefer physical. I can get alot of games way cheaper than digital and if somthing happens with the game app I don’t have to wait for 50gbs plus an update download all over again.
you know in my country which is in north africa digital games are hard to get because we don’t have paypal and credit card are almost rare and physical games are cheaper I once bought 3 PS3 used games for only 15$ where in PSN they could cost around 40$-60$ (and oh first)
I switched to digital only from PS3 – with cfw :))) on PS4,i bought only one BD game,PvZ,which we get free from EA :)))
Saving a little money to buy my offline-pireted-games-only secon ps4 sound fine 😛
Jokes a part me too are gradually swifting to digitals 🙂
I don’t think Sony wants another “PSP-Go” -like console for now. Definitely an attractive option in the future. I don’t want own a discless PS4, if I were to get one ever.
A recent case of a certain playable teaser becoming nigh incapable to (re-)download because a company decides to pull it from the store, even though it’s part of your purchases, comes to mind.
For asinine reasons like those I will almost certainly never go full digital, seeing as I also find joy in actual collecting of physical (collector’s) copies of the media I consume.
The moment everything goes full digital and I don’t truly own the product anymore, I may either stay in the past like a retro-gamer, or jump ship altogether and look for a new hobby.
Good point! P.T. is certainly a good example of why people would not want to go digital
Thank you. The whole reason I haven’t switched to pc gaming yet is because physical media is still strong on consoles, unlike the anti-collector’s mentality of steam and other vendors.
Hey, there is quite an article about that =D
http://wololo.net/2015/02/28/just-my-2-cents-the-digital-games-fallacy/
Jokes aside, I really do not trust companies to support my device forever so I can keep my games at the same price as physical.
Ha, I should totally have mentioned your article in my post as an other aspect of the digital/physical debate!
I would loved if you had =]
I prefer physical, not only that it is cheaper but from West Africa, it is cheaper to buy a new console with free game than to download 50Gb of data which will take days and if not weeks to complete.
Digital is never an option here.
jingle bells by jennifer at the doorstep
give her euros and she starts singing
who cares about digital slim bandwith only.
I try to buy all my single player experiences physical and my multiplayer experiences digital. I like to have the games I play the most(multiplayer) at my fingertips, and I figure single player games have the longest shelf life. There are a few exceptions in both directions, but I’m more likely to go physical over digital, because every game I buy digital is a different game I have to remove from my hard drive.
I’m still rocking the default drive, so maybe when I get around to upgrading that I will have enough room to play with that I won’t mind having more of a digital slant.
In the Philippines. There is a store for 2nd hand physical games which is half the price of the brand New One. Just wait for a month or two and the current game will be available on the second hand shop for half price. This is exclusively on the Philippines. Check http://www.olx.com.ph to check. The conversion is US$1.00=P47.188
Living in Sweden with 100mbit-1gbit, I STILL prefer physical copies. I own maybe 3-4 digital games on my PS3, but they are all classics which hasn’t been released on physical disc. An all out digital machine would really screw me over with all the region locks on the PS Store also.
So yea, I’m a physical game guy (maybe buying 1-3 games a month) but if PS4 where to stop produce consoles with disc drives, my support for Sony gaming would probably stop.
Come to Poland and tell us more how digital is the way. Nope. Digital is still the worst way to acquire games here. They cost from 10% to even 30% more in digital than on physical Bluray and used games are even cheaper. Not to mention that a new game in Poland is equivalent to around 10% of an average salary in Poland. So yeah… No thanks…
And I think Sony learned their lesson with PSP Go.
PS4 w/o a disc drive would be a failure in Japan cause here retail is strong and digital represents around 10% of the market.
The majority of my games are physical copies. I tend to swap and trade a lot of my games which isn’t possible with digital copies. On release in Aus, AAA PS4 games retail for about $64-69 where online they’re generally $99.
definitely depends on the market. but I have basically switched to digital only and love it. the only physical games i’ve bought are the FIFA series of games because i trade in and get the newest version every season and games that I bought originally with the console. But I also have the bandwidth to support it and upgraded my HDD to allow for the storage… I think having the option would be a great idea, but we also need competitive pricing on the PSN Store compared to disc versions sold in B&M stores. If B&M stores could sell digital codes (some do already…) then maybe the pricing would be more like Steam. Who knows.
if given the choice, i’ll always choose physical. being able to share the games with friends by lending to them is a part of the experience and hobby of gaming (seriously, i mean couch co-op is already gone!), at least for me anyway. these days it seems like people had forgotten all about that. physical also tend to be cheaper too. i’ve seen games that are a year old selling at amazon in physical form for $20 while on PSN its still $40, like ***? i have around 20 PS4 blu-ray games. the only time i will buy digital is when a game is digital only such as Journey (digital only in North America). of course i have a year’s worth of PS Plus free digital games too but i didn’t actually buy them.
I don’t think it would be a success, at least not where I com from… Mexico, since good bandwidth here is expensive. The average download speed for most people here is 3mbps, downloading a game like Fallout 4 whose size is like 40 GB, could take a whole day.
Not to mention a scenario where your PS4’s hard drive is almost full, you’d have to erase some games in order to install the new one but later you want to casually play the game you erased a while back, it’d be a really tedious process to erase, download, and install, and again, erase, download, and install.
No fuxxin way.. No internet connection here.. Not goin to this way.. Physical Copy is at least a straight way to keep my bought games.. That i can play offline! I’ll never buy any digital only
Console!
I’ve been mostly digital since PS3 started offering more games in that format… I have my entire 64 gb card filled on my Vita and the only physical I own is JStars because it was imported…. I only have 1 physical game for PS4 idk Y i have it lol dont even play it…. 500 gb also full
I go full digital, physical stuff just filling my room kinda annoying.
Perhaps it might be an idea for Sony to try and make a “silent running” console this generation, i.e. no optical drive (or it has one but you can install the full game and it never needs to access the disc apart from checking the license) and a 256/512GB SSD when the prices come down a bit, plus some kind of passive cooling not involving a fan. Now that would be worth buying!
You need to know the cost of the console and the cost of getting one with an adequate amount of space, you take that cost then have the inflated digital games, it will cost an absolute fortune, this would only be good for people that are more rich, however there is PlayStation now I believe it is called, that could actually be a solution, but still prices are to expensive and more likely to get better deals with disks.
I’ve been getting physical copies latelty because I know I’ll get tired of it in a month and soI can still sell it on ebay and get at least some of my money back. 100% guaranteed better than what gamestop will offer you
On a company point of view like sony, valve, microschrott, nintendo, ea and ubisoft… digital only is the way to go. On a reseller stand point… its a nightmare, abysmal and catastrophic.
One major reason why none of them went digital only is, because they fear that independent resellers (walmart, amazon, media markt,…) will stop selling their devices once thex do that.
Resellers make a lot of money with selling aditional stuff for a device or game console.
The problem with going full digital, at least in the USA, is that we do not yet have 100% broadband coverage. There is at least 1/3 of the country where the only option for internet is satellite or 4g/3g, and both of these come with a cripplingly small data usage cap. It would take me a month and a half to download a new 50GB digital game on the largest package available on the 2 satellite options available in my area (roughly 30 GB a month). If I used a 4G or 3G modem it would take me 3 or 4 months on the largest data plan or I would have to pay an additional $200-$300 beyond the cost of the game, JUST in overage charges if I wanted to finish it the same month I bought it.
As long as ISPs in the USA insist that every precious GB of data beyond their “normal usage” quotes is costing them thousands of dollars to provide and the people insist on “no government regulation”, a digital only platform will problematic.
Maybe Sony should offer a digital buyback program. You purchased a digital game, beat it and no longer play it, then Sony could say we’ll pay you said amount of PSN credit for it towards another purchase after removal from your system. Then it would be removed from your purchased games list as no longer able to download. It’d be a way to ‘sell’ your PSN games towards new downloadable PSN content. Then the console would be more worth making.
Wait wait wait… buyback… that is like refunding right?
NOPE never gonna happen.
Similar but say you bought a game for $20. Well you want to trade it in so to speak. Sony could give you PSN credit at say $7-$8 since its ‘used’ and they remove the license so you no longer own it. It’s like trading it in. You say never gonna happen for refunds, well I’ve successfully gotten a refund on a PSN game which I still own with the license. Not impossible but they CAN do it.
We tried this already with the xbone. The only way for that check in with an auth server to allow you to play a game. The reason why is because if you sell the game, how do they know yoto work is to require constant u don’t have a backup of that license file somewhere? If it’s offline (like with the PSP for example), then just dump the license file back in and voila! You get to have the game and get money for it too. The problem with this approach is the constant connection requirement. Not everyone has the best service around. Some times the auth servers go down with a DDoS attack. ( Like this: http://wololo.net/2015/12/21/xbox-live-down-for-a-few-hours-phantom-squad-takes-credit-and-threatens-psn-might-be-next/) Other times the company doesn’t want to maintain the servers anymore or gets bought out / goes bankrupt. In the end having that requirement just so you can make $6 – $7 bucks back on a $60 purchase is (in my opinion) not worth losing the ability to control when you can play it. Not to mention if you want to make $6 – $7 bucks off of an old $60 purchase, you can do that already. (At least with physical copies) Just go to Gamestop or any other store that buys used games. (Where I live Best Buy and Walmart also do this.)
If you want a digital title, and the benefit that comes without being able to verify you own it, (the presence of a pressed disc means they got paid (assuming it didn’t come with the five finger discount at least…..), digital downloads can be copied easily so this assumption fails) then accept that it’s a money pit and you won’t get back the money you put into it. Yes that sounds harsh, but that’s what you give up when you go digital. You trade control over your copy for the convenience of purchase and storage.
The issue people like myself have with the whole “digital revolution” thing is the possibility that we will loose the physical copies entirely. At that point, we loose every single game for each generation that goes by with the “digital only” policy in effect. The only reason we can dust off the old super nintendo and sega genesis carts and still play them today is because we control them. We control the hardware, we control the carts. There’s nothing that can prevent us from playing them today. (Aside from age and damage.) With digital distribution we have a limited time that we can play the games we buy. (No auth server? No playing for you.) With digital distribution we can’t go back a decade later and buy a game we didn’t have back then, plug it into the console, and play it. (No license file? No auth server? eshop offline? Can’t tell if you own it, so no playing for you.) Heck with digital distribution you can’t even move the games to a newish system on your own in the event your old one breaks. (You need the auth server for that.) With digital only distribution you also create a lot of ewaste. What happens when the auth server goes down for good and that console becomes useless? Easy it gets sent to the dump to rot and collect rust, because without the auth server it won’t do anything.
Long story short: Both digital purchases and retail (physical) purchases have their benefits and drawbacks, but given the choice between playing the game whenever I like, versus renting the game for a limited time, personally I would choose “playing whenever I like”.
I’d prefer physical copies all the way since i’m fond of collecting games. Digital has no value for me.
I mainly buy physical still, my digitals are usually HD remakes of games I already have or indie games.