My understanding is that the game isn't actually on the disc and you still have to download it anyway. I bought a physical copy a couple of weeks ago (£24.99) and just used the keycode to activate and download from steam.
At least you get a perks poster in the box.

Good price

good price

No they don't, Netflix have a custom designed system based on FreeBSD, with arrays of UFS formatted SSD's and dual quad 10 GBE network interfaces for higher demand content.

Lower tier content that's not in as high demand falls back onto different hardware configurations, they may use Amazon services in places, but certainly it is *not* the core of their delivery network.

There's lots of info out there from their presentations at various BSD cons, they're a bit of a poster child for the benefits. They were running into issues with the Linux kernel bottlenecking the speed at which they could move data from the drives to the network interface. It's very interesting stuff.

And, like I said, it's not even a fair comparison, it's not just transfer on Amazon, S3 isn't a CDN, which is what steam would use if they didn't DIY. Check this:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/cdn/

Microsoft, not exactly renowned for being the cheapest, only charge 1.5p per GB for their CDN across the USA and Europe at the lowest rack rate - and steam are well beyond any rack rates :smile:

Funny you mention that, Netflix actually uses Amazon EC2 and S3 for their backend.

The "unlimited" service your box gets is aggregated with everyone else that host has. You use 30 gig, someone else uses 1 gig. In aggregate, it works out for the seller. But it's certainly not unlimited, as you'd find if you over use it and your account gets shut.

You can get spot pricing on amazon to reduce the bandwidth cost somewhat, but in general, $0.08 is the going rate per gb.

Err, or you could look at my £30 server with unlimited 250mb/s upload bandwidth, 1.875 GB/minute, 81 TB/month = 37p per terrabyte, or 0.037 pence per gig. And that's ignoring the 4 cores and 16gb RAM I'm also getting!

Bit of an arbritary example and based on an unlimited service sold on the assumption I won't be using it, but either way, the 5 pence per gig is long forgotten.

Amazon S3 is about more than just storage, and in my opinion poor value. Steam will run their own service, and be able to negotiate major discounts, and it won't be costing them anywhere near that to deliver 1 gb of game content to a user. If bandwidth was that expensive Netflix would have gone out of business a long time ago!

yeah very silly :disappointed:

good price. thanks oP

I don't have a dvd drive....

​This.

Yeah there's only one DVD and still a chunk to download from steam.

​probably the digital version being sold at a marked up set price to increase profits for the seller and developer? physical copies are sold at fixed units to retailers at release date unless the retailer requests more units based on the demand, it is then up to the retailer to sell at whatever price they choose.

Dvd only contains 4.7 gb. :confused:

Unless there's 10 dvds in there, digital download still required.

Google "amazon ec2 server bandwidth pricing" to see prices. It's around $0.08 per gb.

In general 10 games with case weigh 1kg. So that gives you an idea how cheap shipping them around the world is. Can't comment on retail itself, with wages, rent etc. and was just comparing dvd and delivery vs. Bandwidth.

Everyone thing bandwidth is free, it's not and for a 40GB game, plus patches can add up quite a bit!

Do you have a source for your statement? I'd be genuinely interested to see it. I don't believe that server/bandwidth costs would exceed the amount needed to actually transport a physical copy of a videogame to a shop that requires heating, lighting and probably rent to take into account. I suppose some of that applies to maintaining servers but even then, you're cutting out significant overheads faced by a tangible real world product.
I'd be interested to be proven wrong, though!

As for Fallout 4. I'm enjoying it immensely as I have with every game in the series. (bar a console exclusive that I think exists!)

That said, this iteration of the first person style Fallout is the 'shootiest' yet, VATS seems redundant and the RPG element to the game (dialogues and choices) seems quite light compared to New Vegas which was the benchmark for the series in my opinion.
That the protagonist is voiced during interactive sequences is really jarring for myself and I find the actor sounds very bored and disinterested most of the time but that could just be me.

On the other hand there are very pretty visuals and some great user made mods along with the interesting take on settlement building and brilliant use of Power Armour makes it a game worth playing all the same, especially at the £20(ish) mark. It's not as great as New Vegas but as entertaining as Fallout 3, for me. Good game but definitely not quite lived up to the hype, mainly due to the same old gamebryo trademarks such as awful A.I pathfinding and random crashes that New Vegas also had in spades but made up for it with a brilliant narrative.

That's not actually true! The dvd to make and case costs around 20p. But the downloads costs around 5p per Gb to download for the provider. At 40gb that adds up quick.

how in gods name can the DVD be cheaper than a digital version, which has much lower over heads :disappointed: something has gone wrong. great price though :smiley:

Its not a awful game BUT the game engine is very outdated for 2015 , i was also disappointed with some of the dimming down of some of the RPG elements. But its still a very entertaining game even with its faults.

Looks a good price for a physical copy to me. Hot. Although I might wait a little longer....

haha hot from me