What's the Deal with DVDs?

-- November 22, 2005 by: David Craddock

In 1993, Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame was released, and I remember being a very excited eleven year old. It came on four floppy disks. I thought it was a bit time-consuming to install, but other than that, no big deal. Then, a couple of years later, the local video store started allowing customers to rent PC games. I couldn't help but try out Gabriel Knight: The Sins of the Fathers. After all, this was why I had purchased a CD-ROM drive with Christmas money: the beautiful graphics; the immersive background music; and the digitized speech. I played it for a few days before begging my mom to allow me the use of her credit card to order the game online. A couple weeks later it showed up, and I tore open the box to find... eleven floppy disks. Eleven. That was more than time-consuming; that was downright annoying. I remember thinking, "This has got to go."

And finally, floppy disks faded into obscurity. Most PCs don't even come with one by default anymore. There was resistance, at first. There always is. Microsoft Windows 95 shipped on thirteen floppy disks. Of course, it would've been more, had a special type of format not been used. A blog known as The Old Thing cites that the OS shipped on "thirteen of those special Distribution Media Format floppies, which are specially formatted to hold more data than a normal 1.44MB floppy disc. The high-capacity floppies reduced the floppy count by two, which resulted in a tremendous savings in cost of manufacturing and shipping." Yeah, Microsoft. Sure it did.

So I began preparing for the DVD-ROM age around 1998 for so. Not for movies, you understand. For games. I remember thinking, "games are starting to come out on two or three CDs. It's only a matter of time before CDs go the way of floppies and let DVDs take over. I need a DVD-ROM drive, and I need one right now!" It's 2005, and I'm still waiting for the DVD-ROM age to occur. And while it's here, it's not here in quite the way I expected.

Storage is a great example of why DVD should be the dominant format for PC games. The DVD version of Unreal Tournament 2004 released on two discs: one containing the game, and another containing an assortment of extras. The CD version released on six CDs. That is far too much disc swapping. Sure, it was only a problem during the installation phase, but this wasn't always the case. Ever try to install only the Single Player portion of Diablo II? Not the best idea ever. Having to eject the play disc, pop in the cinematics disc, watch for a few minutes, eject the cinematics disc, and reinsert the play disc was really, really annoying. So I bit the bullet and clicked the full installation: a whopping 1500MB, which at the time was a good chunk of hard drive space, but hey... no disc swapping once it's installed. I had to work for it, though. The bloody installation asked for the discs out of order, forcing me to swap even more than I should have had to! What's more, when the expansion set, Lord of Destruction, was released a short time later, you had to insert the Diablo II play disc during the expansion's installation process. Why?! What the...? Why?!

Why, indeed. Having software release on more than ten floppies was unacceptable ten to twelve years ago, so why shouldn't that be the case for CDs in the year 2005? Perhaps it's a matter of user base. After all, it could be possible that most computer game companies believe that most of their customers still use CD-ROM drives. This would explain a lot, right? Well, it would, but this is not the case. According to a survey conducted by the Consumer Electronics Association, roughly forty-two percent of home computers contained a DVD-ROM drive in the year 2003. Sixty percent still used CD-ROM drives. However, the survey also stated that 47% would be purchasing at least one DVD-ROM drive for their home system within the next two years. Valve conducted a similar survey in August of 2005, which shows that over eighty-five percent of its user base owns at least one DVD-ROM drive. Of course, those statistics account only for Steam users, but the results are still staggering.

In many cases, consumers have not had to upgrade from CD-ROM to DVD-ROM; this new fangled technology was provided for them right out of the box. For the past few years, companies such as Dell, Gateway, HP and more have sold computers with DVD-ROM drives at prices that average around $550. Only the extremely cheap systems such as this one from Dell don't come standard with a DVD drive, but if you'll notice, a CD-RW/DVD combo drive can be added for only $20, whereas a DVD+/-RW can be added for only $50.

The above prices are very important to note. Computer hardware can be very expensive sometimes, but not in the case of DVD drives. They're cheap, and they have been cheap for quite a few years now. Buy.com has DVD drives for less than $30, and even has DVD +/- RW drives for less than $50. There you have it, publishers: DVD-ROM drives are cheap! Trust me, if there are gamers out there willing to spend over $500 on a new video card--and I'm one of them--it can be assumed that they're willing to spend approximately nine times less than that on a DVD-ROM drive. That's right, id Software: I went out and bought a 256MB video card for Doom 3. You really could have given me a DVD edition of the game.

But wait! It turns out that I'm wrong: some games are indeed released on DVD! Well silly me, it looks like all this research and convincing I've had to do is moot. I can go out and buy World of WarCraft on DVD, so there's no harm done, right? Wrong. PC games are available on DVD, but typically at a higher price than their CD-ROM brethren. You'll find that your desire to own F.E.A.R., World of WarCraft, Quake IV, and others on DVD will cost you at least $5 more than it really should. On Walmart.com, the CD edition of F.E.A.R. is approximately $43, while the DVD "Director's Cut" is approximately $60. The CD edition began its retail life at $50, and is now almost $10 less at all major retailers. And yet the DVD edition holds steady at its original price point.

So what justifies the higher price of DVD editions? Bonus content, that's what. Special/Platinum/Director's editions are brilliant marketing ploys to get consumers to spend more of their money; sometimes they're worth it, and sometimes they're not. The Collector's Edition of World of WarCraft is a perfect example. It came bundled with the game on CD and DVD; (of course, the point of this was to give whatever copy you didn't use to a friend so Blizzard could get an easy extra signup) an in-game pet; the soundtrack; a 200+ hardcover art book; a behind-the-scenes DVD; a signed copy of the game's manual; an exclusive in-game pet; a one month subscription to the game; a free ten day guest pass to accompany the extra copy of the game; (again, they want you to give it to a friend) and a cloth map. Now, I took the time to list all of that stuff out to show an example of a CE that is more than worth its price point: around $80. That's a lot to pay for a game no matter how dedicated a gamer you may be, but it was worth it.

Not all collector's editions are that bounteous, however. I wanted Half-Life 2 on DVD, so my girlfriend at the time kindly splurged on the collector's edition for Christmas '04. I got the game on DVD, (yay!) a t-shirt, and a teeny tiny guidebook that walked me through maybe the first thirty seconds of the game. For nearly $100, even I felt ripped off, and I didn't have to pay for it. I loved the game itself, but I found it extremely unfair that we consumers were forced to pay so much in order to own the game on DVD. Games like F.E.A.R. aren't such a bad deal right at first. As previously mentioned, the CD edition started its life at $50 while the DVD edition began at $55. That's only $5 more, so no big deal. But as the price of the CD edition falls, shouldn't the DVD version fall as well?

The Sims 2 was a classic example of marketing done right. EA released the critically acclaimed PC game at a price of $50, and this pertained to not only the CD-ROM edition, but the DVD-ROM edition as well. What's more, the DVD edition came with a few extras at no extra charge. While the bonus features weren't a determining factor in my purchase, I was pleased that they were offered at no extra cost whatsoever. A brilliant marketing move, and I wish more games would follow suit.

Perhaps cost plays a part in choosing to release a game on CD versus DVD. But not cost on the part of the consumer: instead, on the part of the manufacturer. It does take a lot to put out even a single copy of a video game. You've got to press the discs, get the packaging ready, print manuals, ship the actual product, et cetera. Does it cost more to print a game on a single DVD as opposed to three or more CDs? Well, in a way, the CD option is cheaper... but only if you are using a single disc. Once companies fall into the realm of needing multiple CDs for their product, the cost of printing the finished game onto DVD becomes much, much more affordable. I spoke to Joe Lauerman, a representative from Great Lakes Media Technology to find out more about the cost, and was given lots of useful information. For 10,000 CD-ROMs the price point was $0.39 each, while the exact same quantity of DVD-ROMs sits at $0.65 each. This takes into account only the physical molding of the discs themselves.

There are a few reasons for the slighter higher cost of the DVDs. First, the actual mastering for the mold of a DVD-ROM is a bit more expensive than that of a CD-ROM. Since most games use the DVD-9 (single side; dual layers) format, this requires two molds to be made.

Royalty fees for each disc make up reason number two. The fees are usually twice as much for a DVD than a CD. Mr. Lauerman elaborates, saying that Great Lakes Media is "a Philips licensed replicator which requires us to pay these fees. In return, we assure them that we will manufacture our discs exactly to their specs. With a DVD-ROM, you have an additional group called C6 that also get royalties paid to their group for DVD patents."

The third and final reason for the slightly higher cost is the expensive equipment needed to manufacture DVD-ROMs. Mr. Lauerman says the necessary equipment can range anywhere from $100,000 to $300,000, "[or] more depending on its [the equipments'] configuration and flexibility. This costs needs to recovered, hence another reason for the higher cost of a DVD vs. CD."

Even with the higher costs, the advantages to using DVD over CD cannot be ignored. DVDs provide better sound and video than CDs, much higher capacities, and the most widely accepted media format in the entire world. But the three reasons listed above take into account only the costs for manufacturing the discs themselves; there are lots of other factors that demonstrate how CDs can actually cost more than DVDs to produce. Take casing, for example. If your company has decided to release a PC game on four CDs, do you go for the quad-case, or the rather shoddy paper sleeves? If the game in question is meant to be a triple A title, you probably want to go with the quad-case for a bit of extra fanciness. In this case, the casing for the game will increase your costs quite a bit, much more than if the game were to release on a single DVD and thus require only a single DVD case. Unless companies want to release a product on a single CD-ROM--and in this day and age, such releases are rare--they'll actually be saving money on all fronts by releasing the game on a DVD-ROM. And of course there are other considerations such as printing colored images onto each disc: using our four disc set, each CD has to have an image on the case. And again, the costs are rising.

When will computer games permanently appear on DVD? It's hard to say. For now, the PC gamers of the world are stuck paying extra for a DVD edition of game X for bonus materials they may or may not want. If I had to guess, I'd say all computer games will appear exclusively on DVD when the next big thing picks up steam: Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Until then, be prepared to pay the extra bucks to save yourself some disc swapping. For right now, it's the only choice we have.

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