If some vidya for PC gets a physical release, what's the best medium to release it on? As in an actual release with content on the medium instead of just having fancy packaging for a product key. I've seen some publishers do limited physical releases of their games on flash drives, which these days are more accessible than CD-ROM's given how many gaming desktops forego DVD (or M-disc) drives, but I heard flash drives lose their data if they're not plugged in for a few years, which makes me think they're worse than disc media if you're picking the physical game up from a bargain bin several years after it came out. I guess cartridges are also an option if you do a Switch release, but I'm specifically talking about PC games here.
For the sake of the argument, assume that said disc media isn't bound by its capacity. I mentioned CD-ROM's, but let's say your game can also release on a Blu-ray or a bunch of DVD-ROM's instead if you want.
/g/-related instead of IQfy-related because this is about the longevity of different kinds of physical media
Optical media is unreliable and stupidly fragile.
Distributing on CF Cards would be ideal as they can reliabily hold up to 500GB, perfect for offline installs.
Unfortunately it seems nobody uses CF Cards anymore.
Magneto optical. Take your save files on the go!
Alternatively, 5D optical looks really promising, even in a small form. We'd no longer need hard drives again.
>optical media is unreliable and stupidly fragile
Comparatively it is unreliable and fragile to a cartridge, but I have disks from 2000 that have never seen the inside of a israeliteel case that still work, so...
>5D optical
Looked it up, looks neat. I remember seeing something like this being worked on in the mid-2000's, though the article I found about it says the first prototypes came out in 2013. I couldn't find anything at first glance about drives that can read them, which is depressing considering how the article I found about them is from 2016, so there was eight years without the format becoming available to the public. Sad!
>Magneto optical
That would work pretty good for indie games designed for hipsters since most of them are into minidiscs, unfortunately I feel like it's really hard to find anyone who has a minidisc drive in a society where DVD drives are maybe in 10% of people's daily drivers.
>5D
To be fair, these are still in the stage of "promising but very early technologies." Pretty much anything made for it isn't made to be mass manufactured, but various custom made prototypes until reliability can be improved.
I'm wondering if you're thinking of M-Disc, which promised data storage for a thousand years, and became commercially available in 2009.
>MO minidisc
Unfortunate, really.
That said, I was kind of basing that off of my dream console, which would likely have its own built drive anyways.
>I'm wondering if you're thinking of M-Disc
What I remember seeing in the mid-2000's was some glass thing that you could read data from, but it was also a simulation of something that was either hypothesized or in early development. I've heard of M-Discs but haven't messed with them (despite having an M-Disc drive on my machine which I got for messing with Blu-rays), I guess picking some up to try them out wouldn't hurt but idk if I'd need 100 GB for my hypothetical indie game when I'm aiming for under 500 MB for the installation file (hence suggesting CD-ROMs earlier)
Looks like there are M-Disc DVD's too, didn't know that. Maybe that's the ideal thing here, I guess that answers my question in the OP somewhat. But I wonder how many gamers out there have M-Disc drives, it's gonna be a fraction of the already small fraction of people who have ANY disc drives in their computers.
I wonder if M-Discs have the same thing going on as CD's where burned discs last for much less longer than pressed discs (CD-R vs. CD-ROM), but I don't know if any movie or game companies release their stuff on M-Discs. I guess it might be similar to tapes with how tapes made of metal were the best ones, except here it has to do with longevity.
M-Discs were never tested pressed, so I have no idea. They were designed EXPLICITLY to be burnt by people and companies wanting to back up their most important documents, so logically no one's manufactured any pressed M-discs for testing this.
Interestingly, from a cursory glance, it looks like the DVD M-disc format can be read by regular CD-ROM drives made after 2004, and can be burnt to by any blu-ray drive made after 2010. This makes it incredibly ideal for that 10%. Additionally, if you can release enough sufficiently good games on physical-only, the people will buy the drives to play those games(think of it like console exclusivity.) Those drives tend to be less than 50 bucks anyways and can be used for other stuff afterwards, like watching movies or anime, or backing up important documents in a format that won't be immediately lost, so it's generally a good investment either way.
M-Disc DVD lasts for 1000 years. M-Disc bluray however is no better than a standard Sony HTL disc.
>5D optical [...] We'd no longer need hard drives again.
It's ROM. You can't rewrite it.
You seemed to have missed my point. Yes, it's ROM. I'm aware of this. You know what else I'm aware of? Call of Duty's full install takes 200 gigabytes. Hitman 2 takes 93. Destiny 2 takes 125+. Red Dead Redemption takes 150.
One of the big issues of this most current generation is to increase read speeds, you have to install these games to your drive. Also, a Blu-Ray caps out at 200 gigabytes, so games like Medal of Honor struggle to exist on disk, and Ark: SA is never existing on a Blu-Ray.
Not only can the crystal disk store everything, but the data is incredibly tightly packed together, decreasing read times significantly. This somewhat nullifies a hard drive's advantage of high read speeds(not entirely though, the drive will be faster.) The capacity also blows the major advantage of more storage space right out of the water, hence my original remark, "we'd no longer need hard drives ever again."
It's only that expensive because it's atrophying right now. Of COURSE floppies are expensive, they're no longer manufactured to the scale that let them be sold for less than .25 cents a pop.
A SSD is typically under warranty for 400 cycles of full writing. The (project) limit on writing to a 5d optical disc is about the same as the limit on writing to a 1TB SSD.
Most HDDs are under warranty for more like 600,000 cycles, so that comparison is less favorable. A 5d optical disc will tolerate about as writing as a 2GB HDD.
CFexpress is the new hotness
I work in medicine and we used these up until 2016 for backing up reitnal fundus photos. We still have a ton but no reader to access them.
Are we talking about the same thing?
...you can take the disc out and put it in a regular optical drive.
(not that anon) Probably no, that thing looks like MO disc. And some time ago quick are-those-things-still-sold search revealed mostly medecine-related suppliers.
tl;dr
It's a CD case you can stick in some CD drives.
Magneto optical discs also use caddies but
is a compact disc caddy.
A disc caddy is pretty much the same thing as a floppy disc's jacket.
It's a cartridge that contains a disc with an external hub that can spin the disc inside, a window to the disc inside, and a shutter over the window.
You insert the cartridge into a drive that accommodates it. The drive holds the shutter open, spins the hub, and otherwise works like a normal drive.
Floppy discs and magneto optical discs require this arrangement to protect their fragile discs.
Compact discs do not require caddies, but caddies are tougher than compact discs and they prevent you from scratching the discs.
CD caddies fell out of fashion because they were and added cost and their extra mechanisms made CD drives bulkier.
DVDs came after CD caddies fell out of fashion so I am not aware of any DVD drives that accept caddies.
Very early BDs were fragile and required caddies but as soon as they found a way to make the discs durable they got rid of the caddies to save money.
take me back
sovl as fvck
wtf do you mean. There are discs from 30 years ago still working. Unless you mean cheaply produced garbage media that gets disc rot?
I forgot to mention that when I think of MO, I'm thinking of the full scale magneto optical disks. A few prototypes exist so I know the concept is possible, but I don't think anything made it publicly due to the practicality versus a CD-ROM at the time, which is unfortunate.
I think the ideal physical medium should combine ROM storage (for longevity reasons) and flash storage (for storing save data, DLC, patches, etc). The less stuff I have to install on my machine the better.
>I guess cartridges are also an option if you do a Switch release, but I'm specifically talking about PC games here.
You could just combine these 2 ideas. The game is stored on ROM chips but in the external form factor of a USB flash drive. Physically compatible with nearly every PC and you eliminate your fear of data loss.
optical is too expensive.
the tech has been in standstill the past decade with nothing new happening.
I just wish DVD-A/BD-A would become the new standard for physical music. 24b/48kHz (96kHz is a meme IMO but you could do that too), six or eight-channel audio, and space for music videos and bonus material, especially with BluRay.
Finally a return to the home sound system listening experience.
I've always wanted to make a physical release of my game when I finish it with a kino aesthetic halftone and silver disc art
From what I've researched it seems like DiscMakers is the best option but you have to order a few hundred to have it actually replicated instead of burned to blank cds
Someday I'm gonna do it dammit
OP here, thanks for the suggestion. I'll keep DiscMakers in mind for whenever I'll end up publishing something to physical.