According to the latest PC Gamer, Everquest 2 is shipping on no less than 10 CDs w/ a 10 GB install.
Admittedly a 2 DVD version is also being explored but this is getting ridiculous- its time for publishers to make the switch to DVDs as standard.
I really wish Sony would make it DVD only. Everquest 2 is likely to be incentive for quite a few people to spring the extra money for a DVD drive if they haven’t already done so. Hell, they should make an additional SKU with a bundled Lite-On DVD drive for $20 more.
I like that idea! Although to be fair they’d really need to make it a USB drive so the less technically oriented could have a chance of using it, which would ratchet the cost up a bit.
EQ had a poll during the log-in process about 6 months ago asking subscribers whether they had a DVD drive and if they’d be willing to buy one to purchase a DVD-only version of EQ2.
I’m sure the results of this poll were used in the decision to ship on CDs. I didn’t own a DVD drive at the time of the poll, and I said I wouldn’t upgrade simply for EQ2. My CD-ROM drive has since died, so I did get a DVD replacement.
Opening and closing my drive 10 times during one install, for a game I may play for the next 3 years, is not a huge hassle for me, and wasn’t worth upgrading my system for. However, I am a stingy bastard who remembers using cassette tapes to load games, so my experiences may not be typical of most readers.
I predict the industry will shift in the US when we get to 20 CD installs and not before. Of course by that point we’d be talking about 4 DVDs anyway so hopefully we’d have something even more dense to shift to (blue-ray DVD?).
If games start to routinely come on 10 CDs, I think we’ll see more DVD versions. Is that going to happen, though? EQ2 is probably cramming voiceover work onto 3 or 4 of those CDs. Most games aren’t going to have that much voiceover work.
I remember this same exact thing happening when floppies were being phased out for CDs. Producing a CD version of the software was already cheaper, but the company I worked for had to wait a year before the PC industry and the public accepted CDs as the standard media. Same thing going on here.
Of course, back then we didn’t have people burning thousands of music files to floppies to play on their home and car players, so no doubt that’s having a drag effect on moving to DVDs.
From what I’ve been told, EQ2 isn’t actually intended to be a user base progression from EQ1–they want them to coexist, with continued support and expansion packs for EQ1. A lot of EQ1 players haven’t made a significant hardware upgrade since Shadows of Luclin and play EQ1 almost exclusively, anyway. Witness how much the Valve survey was slanted towards the GeForce 2 MX and TNT 2–since the overwhelming majority of Steam users are just playing Counter-Strike:
I don’t have any fears- I’m not even going to play Everquest 2 (I don’t play MMORGs). I do, however, want to see games transition to DVD. While not every game is taking up 10 CDs, most new games come on at least three and UT2k4 was something like 5, I believe.
If the transition is every going to happen it will take a high profile game coming out on DVD only. I think Everquest 2 would go along way toward that and, in that case, the DVD release is certainly justified.
Well, when the DVD version of UT2K4 came out, the demand was pretty high, at least in my store. We sold through our second shipment of the DVD’s rather quickly. I’m hoping that high sales of the DVD version of UT2K4 shows that DVD-ROM based games are quite viable. I mean, I just got a replacement DVD-ROM drive at a computer show for $23, so there’s no excuse for folks NOT to have a DVD-ROM these days.
Are EQ players still using the same hardware from when they started playing the game. How much have some spent just to keep up with the first game? SOE has upgraded EQ in the past that pretty much required new hardware. More RAM, faster CPU, and with the DX9 advances a new video card. With that I don’t see the problem with having the get a $30 DVD drive as being some barrier to buying.
