The characteristics of the systems we use control the usage that we make of them. Not having fast internet means you don't do the kinds of things people do with fast internet.
It's more likely that people play console games they can buy on disk at walmart. Another alternative would be to use a pirated version that is highly compressed with extra crap removed. For instance fitgirls has a version of forza that is only 67GB. There are times when it might actually make sense even to buy a game to support the dev AND still pirate it.
So what can we do about the situation. Obviously we can continue to expand faster internet but as developers maybe we should offer our own compressed version if we can't bring ourselves to economize in general. For instance some games that top 100GB have 10s of GB of uncompressed audio that could profitably be reduced. We can ensure that locale specific content like languages can be disabled. We could break levels into content packs that can be downloaded AS the game is used. Maybe that 120GB can be reduced to 60GB of which 20GB needs to be downloaded immediately to start playing? How many users play some of a game and move on? My bet would be a LOT.
It's more likely that people play console games they can buy on disk at walmart. Another alternative would be to use a pirated version that is highly compressed with extra crap removed. For instance fitgirls has a version of forza that is only 67GB. There are times when it might actually make sense even to buy a game to support the dev AND still pirate it.
So what can we do about the situation. Obviously we can continue to expand faster internet but as developers maybe we should offer our own compressed version if we can't bring ourselves to economize in general. For instance some games that top 100GB have 10s of GB of uncompressed audio that could profitably be reduced. We can ensure that locale specific content like languages can be disabled. We could break levels into content packs that can be downloaded AS the game is used. Maybe that 120GB can be reduced to 60GB of which 20GB needs to be downloaded immediately to start playing? How many users play some of a game and move on? My bet would be a LOT.