US gets Forza 3, downloadable Alan Wake 360 hardware bundle for Christmas

I still don’t quite understand what the point of the ‘downloadable’ Alan Wake is. Why not just throw a disc in there?

I think Alan Wake seems suited for a downloadable version.

Especially if MS did a Fable II-esque chapter release on Marketplace.

“I still don’t quite understand what the point of the ‘downloadable’ Alan Wake is. Why not just throw a disc in there?”

No second hand sales, perhaps? Besides, the bandwidth may cost them less than the disc, who knows…

I’d be more interested in a Fable 3 bundle. And maybe some points to spend on the store.

When I was a kid when I got a new console or games for Xmas I wanted to play them all ASAP. What I didn’t want to do was wait several freakin hours for the game to download.

In a few years time that’ll be the only option anyway…

…they should probably pre-install them though (maybe they do?).

@5
Good job Alan Wake is neither a game for kids, nor are you a kid anymore then, innit.

@6, in a few years time I’m hoping we’ll be looking at 1Gb/s connections and it’ll be minutes rather than hours.

@7, it’s a 15, I’d let my kids play it at say, 12, there’s no gore and is about as scary as a puppy with a pink bow on.

Not at all f_s, because whilst the connection speeds will have increased (and sure as shit nothing like what you’re suggesting there, because we’ll be too bottlenecked server side), so will the sizes of the games… considerably.

@9, various firms are already trialling 1Gb/s systems. Just a matter of time.

Server capacity can always be upped and capability improved, and as demand increases, it will be.

Although since Microsoft will undoubtedly be using Microsoft servers I wouldn’t hope for too much

It’s not literally about server capacity, it’s about backbone capacity. All increasing user speeds does is move the bottleneck further up the tree, to a point where it’s much, much harder to increase capacity.

(Fancy putting down another bunch of cross Atlantic cabling? Because as soon as you get 1gbps to any significant amount of users the current backbone links will hit capacity almost instantly)

Everything will have to be upgraded eventually to continue web growth.

Just a matter of time.

“Just a matter of time.”

Yep, let’s say around 20 years

At the rate the demand for web based services and streaming media is progressing it’ll be much sooner than 20 years.

And as I said 1Gb/s lines are being trialled.

The cross-Atlantic cabling shouldn’t really be a problem if local/regional servers are used to serve content rather than serving from a single central source. Steam does it already.

“Everything will have to be upgraded eventually to continue web growth.”

Yes, but you made it sound like we’re going to go from averaging 6mbps to suddenly getting 1000mbps+ in the next five years. It’s not going to happen. Well, not unless some exotic new tech turns up or someone works out a way to charge £200 a month for it anyway.

It’s just not feasible. Hell, I’ve got a 50mb connection and I can count on one hand the numbers of servers which allow me to max it out (ironically one of them is Microsoft’s technet service). I can’t even max it out using my own servers as the datacentres I use wont allow individual connections to suck up that much bandwidth.

Yeah, because we’re talking about a world where copper wire is still the standard.

The tech exists, it just needs refinement over the next few years and investment to roll it out.

Ok, maybe 5 years is a bit optimistic, but I don’t see it taking as long as 20.

Investment is the problem. If they can’t find a way to make some serious profit from it, it wont be done. The 80s are long gone.

There’s definitely profit in it.

The future of computing is almost certainly in the cloud, and that’s gonna take some serious bandwidth. Ultimately the cost of refreshing the network where it needs to be refreshed will dwarf what it costs businesses in maintaining server farms and qualified IT support on all their locations and full desktop PCs for every employee.

The fact that Google are really pushing ahead with this will garner a lot of interest.

How many gbs is the bundle and do you need xbox live to download wake? 2 very important factors for me

You don’t need Gold to download full games, but you would obviously need to be able to connect to Live in order to do it. A free account would suffice.

Size-wise, it’s going to probably be 5-6gb I’d have thought. Can’t quite remember how big my install from the disc was, but it’s going to be a pretty meaty download.

“At the rate the demand for web based services and streaming media is progressing it’ll be much sooner than 20 years.”

I don’t know where you’re from, but here in Germany it’s going to take at least 20 years And as long there’s no fast internet in EU no one will even think about downloadable games I think.

I meant the hdd of the console sorry I wasn’t specific

The link in the 1st line takes you to another article that says it’s the 250GB model.

@21, we’ll see man. That’s all I can say for now :p

Germany being the economic powerhouse of Europe I woulda thought it’d have a broadband infrastructure befitting that.

“Germany being the economic powerhouse of Europe I woulda thought it’d have a broadband infrastructure befitting that.”

That’s the problem. I live in a town with 30k+ residents near the swiss and french border and the max speed you can get here is (only!) 50 mbits and it has its price. Other smaller towns doesn’t even have this opportunity, so I think it looks even worse in other countries or regions.

But as you’ve already said: we’ll see