Given that there are some areas in the world where internet is unreliable, or where people are having connection problems or they have download limits, I would like to see the option of being able to purchase the basic sim on a USB flash drive.
Please note that this would be only the base sim. Once installed the client could register their licence key, and still download updates across the web as they are pushed out.
It’s still faster and cheaper to produce disks.
Not everyone owns an optical drive anymore, though.
I haven’t had an Optical drive for over 5 years now. The last DVD drive I bought for my PC was in 2012.
If you want physical media to distribute, a small portable SSD is the way to go.
There will be a critical point though. That the amount of update that you’ll be downloading might exceed the initial size that you get from the flash drive. At that point, it’s probably faster to just download the whole game from the server than install the one from the drive, and have it replaced completely by the updated files from the server.
It’s even worse when you have 10 DVDs to cycle through. I left DVD software installation alone back in 2010. I have all my software in my portable external HDD ever since, and in SSD now.
Assuming 20ish bucks for a 128GB USB drive, I don’t think they’ll ever do it. Maybe they will if they shove that expense on to the buyer.
As @Neo4316 pointed out, with many patches/updates released you’ll end up downloading a big part of the sim after a fresh install anyway.
The updater is structured in packages and whenever one change is done, the whole package needs to be downloaded again.
So it won’t save any bandwidth/size pre-installing an initial version of the game.
It’s like installing a fresh windows and then waiting for 10 times the size of security and feature updates to download.
What you basically need is an up-to-date packaged flightsim on a usb that represents the current patch level, whenever installing it.
Isn’t that what most physical distribution is sold at? You know, digital purchase is at MSRP, physical purchase like a flash drive or DVD would cost extra. Since it’s an extra effort and costs made by the publisher to create those physical media.
For me, I think a better way to have a physical distribution is to have those USB flash drive as a “portable app”. You plug it in the first time, you can run it and you log in. If there’s any update from that point, it’ll download and install the update straight away. And it becomes permanent. If you stopped playing, you can just unplug it from the PC, and the next time you want to run the sim, you plug it back in, login, and off you go.
That way, as long as you have it, and run it regularly, it’ll always going to get updated with whatever update is available up to that point. But it’s also saving both network and your internal storage as well.
But I’m guessing, running it straight from the Flash drive would require USB 4.0 certification on both the PC slot, as well as the flash drive itself.
USB 3.0 optical drives are too inexpensive to not have one. I once dabbled in video editing, and I can tell you that multiple copies of longer videos will quickly fill your storage. Burning to optical media is cheap and easy, even if it does take a little longer than a thumb drive. And when stored properly, optical media is much more permanent.
Which again, as I said will become obsolete long before the permanency of such storage be of actual use. Because as the sim gets updated over and over. In the course of 1 year, there would already be gigabytes of updates. Then you move on to year 2, year 3, year 4, 5, and so on. Overtime, the whole game that you stored in the optical media is useless if the cumulative game update has overhauled the entire thing and then more.
I’m more inclined towards cloud storage. As internet speed increases and bandwidth widens every year. You would have access to cloud storage easier. And they’re relatively just as permanent as optical storage without you having to actually store a physical media. Not to mentioned the production and unecessary waste of the optical media storage. A cloud storage is just a huge hardware that everyone can access. And the data can stay relevant as needed.
I used to have a collection of DVDs of movies that I collected. But after 10 years, I still kept the DVD stored properly and I can still watch them if I want. But after the advent of Blu-Ray with 1080p, then another Blu-Ray 4K, then 4K HDR. These advancements made my DVD collection practically useless. As I can just build a collection of my movies digitally using an SSD and housed in a media player. It should be long enough for it to stay relevant, until the next gen comes in, like 8K or something. By that time, I would have just replaced my original collection with the new format. So I don’t need to have the old format being wasted sitting around doing nothing. I’ve ditched optical media long ago, and I keep my data either in a cloud, or in a library of HDD or SSD.