Tag Archives: ADSL2+

There are these moments a person cherishes. In my case it was the info as I saw it in the last week. I am not in a gloating mood, but the idea that I can say to the CEO of Sony (and Microsoft) “I told you so!” feels pretty good.

So what happened? As I looked at my PlayStation Plus options I saw a great thing (really!). You see, Killzone is available as a free download for those who have PlayStation Plus. So, a new game, which was $100 at release night, is now a freebie if you have PlayStation Plus! This is truly a great thing! I did take an initial look, but I did not like the game (a personal choice), so it was not for me.

Make sure you take note, that I am not calling this a bad game! It is just not the game for me. This is fair enough as we can’t all like the same game!

It was at that moment that I noticed the little setback (for those who want it). The Download is 39Gb. Yes! It is 39,000 Megabyte, the size of 900 DVD’s. This is what my issue was from the very beginning with all that Microsoft online store approach for games and movies. This online approach is all nice, but take into consideration that many will likely have less than a 60 Gb monthly allowance. Adjusting that, a person’s internet costs would go up by $240-$600 a year, this means ADDITIONAL costs, not your overall internet bill. The second part is now also clear. Those who want this would sacrifice 10% of their hard drive in one go. Now, I will admit that you can buy a larger drive if need be (and you will need to). Instead of adding the $20 at the very beginning and giving the consumers a drive twice the size would have been so worth it. Now, they will need to spend $89 – $179 to get the size a gamer needs long term (1-2 Tb, which is 1,000-2,000 Gb).

Oh, and it seems that people with the Xbox One, they do not have that option, they will only have the option to add an external drive, so more cables, possible additional power plugs, it will get messy quite quickly!

So, we have two issues, our internet will max really fast and in addition we will need more storage space and all this becomes visible within 5 weeks of these NextGen consoles being released. There is of course the other side too; did these ISP’s consider the issue when millions will all download the latest games and movies? These people might all be connected through different ISP’s, yet when the internet needs to facilitate a data need of 35,000,000 Gigabyte on the night of release, things will go pear shaped really fast. That part was shown when 100,000 people tried to connect to their GTA-V online part, routers all over the world could not keep up and that was just the login. Yes, we know that the makers themselves had issues as well, but when we see issues where ISP, Rockstar and Console makers are pointing at one another we the gamers lose and that was ‘just’ a 7Gb game. I foresee that many ISP’s will get massive issues when tens of thousands of gamers try to get that 35 Gb download.

This is where we stand and there is more to come sooner than most think. Even if you have the game on disk, what happens when you have to download patches that are several Gigabytes in size? Killzone needs a large patch (not sure the exact size) and it seems that a patch will need to come for Lego Marvel super heroes. What happens when you have a dozen games? How much bandwidth for downloads will be required then? Let us not forget that downloads for patches and updates have existed forever, when we see that these larger games are above 35 Gb each, the size of these patches will dramatically increase as well. When you move from a broadband plan of $49 to a plan of $120 each month? Will you still be happy with your Next Generation console? I will admit that $120 was the largest I saw in one case only (worst scenario approach), but the reality still remains. How long for these downloads to complete? That really depends on your connection, but unless you have ADSL2 or better, downloading games that big becomes a non-option, even in the best circumstances of ADSL2 it could take around 9 hours to get through it all and if you are doing other things on the internet whilst it downloads (like Facebook/Google+) that download time will go up by a lot, so it is more than overnight. If there is a connection loss at any time you might lose more than a day. I feel certain that many people had not thought that through and did not reckon on having to deal with a download Behemoth (unless they stick to buying discs). Now, many games will not get to be that large!

Anything below 10Gb (which is still 2 DVD’s) can easily be downloaded on most connections, even though it might take a little while. Yet the NextGen is all about really high resolution (like Blu-ray), which makes the 35Gb minimum space more likely to be the average standard size then the exceptional large title.

So, do you still feel good about your Next Gen console? I truly hope you do, just make sure that you do not cut your own fingers on the download issues and if you have a PS4 (or will get one), then upgrade that hard drive sooner rather than later, because upgrading the drive immediately is just an annoyance, upgrading it after a year of gaming might turn that operation into a small nightmare.