Epic Founder - Misquoted On 'Physical' Media

Just a few days ago, a number of top websites were quoting Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney as saying that physical media has no place in future games consoles.

Game Breakers took the opportunity to speak to Tim this morning and he's cleared a few things up.

[Otheros00]

Damage control

[dangert12]

nothing wrong with it.in the future i do believe games through psychical media will come to an end just not so soon we have a way to go yet

[Stealth20k]

if the industry was run by you it would fail

[plb]

DD has it's pros and cons. The one thing I don't like about DD is I can't sell/trade/share the game. I've regretted a few purchases on Steam but can't do anything about it but with games on my PS3 I can easily just trade it or sell it on craigslist/ebay and at least get some of my money back.

[darthv72]

The advancements in physical storage have grown so far in such a short amount of time but there will still be some type of limitation.

Even with downloadable content you will have to have something to store it on. Be it flash memory or a hdd there is a physical limit to everything.

If there was a dynamic storage medium that expanded and contracted based on the amount of data to be stored would be ideal. One format that could be as small as 1k or as large as....?

[Darkfocus]

ya once we have fast internet at reasonable prices available everywhere there'll be no need for physical media and it'll go the way of the dinosuar imo. I've been using steam for the last 2 years and haven't bought a physical copy since, its just better in every way faster,cheaper, and more convenient.

[gamingdroid]

How is that damage control?

First of all, if you are a technical geek that understood what he said you would know that he simply specified the current weakness in physical media.

He then just further clarified. Now, there is nothing stopping NAND memory becoming the standard physical media, but I suspect that physical media is rapidly disappearing. Give it another decade and it is essentially gone.

[DeadlyFire]

Flash USB drives would be great way to store games I believe. No expensive disc drive. No worries about dropping or tossing it around or scratching it up. Getting lost maybe as a worry, but that is typical. I believe the price point of flash drives are not quite at that golden number for game developers and console makers to accept them with the right space requirement just yet.

SSD and Flash USB drives will be here within 5 years and be very affordable. Likely killing the old HDD and taking over the portable storage market.

[rabidpancakeburglar]

Good, I was getting scared

[SKUD]

Misquote from the media?. NEVER.

/s

[SuperStrokey1123]

DD is awesome and terrible all at the same time... if they dropped the price of games though and garanteed me access forever (within reason of course) and over multiple systems i might be in favor of it. Currently no way though.

[Tyre]

There u have it memorycards and game installs next to downloads are the nextgen's media because of the acces speeds....and we could still sell/trade/share cause games will still be distributed on physical memorycards like for Sony's NPG.....streaming is horrible(and not feasible because of the quality and lag) and people still like to OWN their games....be able to play offline when ever they like.