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Jaffe Would Have Ditched Blu-Ray
GameDaily is reporting on comments made by God of War designer David Jaffe. In an interview with Geoff Keighley, Jaffe has stated that he believes Blue-ray should have been removed from the PS3 so that the console could be sold at a lower price point. "Jaffe didn't outright label it a mistake either, but he's the first Sony employee (to this editor's knowledge) to even question the need for Blu-ray. SCE Worldiwide Studios President Phil Harrison and other Sony executives have repeatedly stressed the importance of the Blu-ray format, not just as a next-gen movie format, but as a game disc format that provides game developers with plenty of storage space to build highly detailed game worlds without the need for multiple discs."
Long Live Blu-ray, well at least until Violet-Ray or some other shit comes along.
.. oh, Jaffe. Never mind. But working in a UK electronics store as I do I can confirm that whereas the 360 and the Wiis were damn hard to get hold of for the first few months after launch, we have loads and loads of PS3s in stock. One store, W H Smiths, is even discounting the console to £399.99. Not a good sign.
He's an actual game developer, so he knows that more space doesn't necessarily translate into better games.
There are two ways to use more space:
1) Fill it with content
2) Fill it with useless garbage (like, say, badly compressed cinematics...)
And, as most people know these days, content is EXPENSIVE.
In the interview he talks about (I'm summarizing here, so I'm probably off a little bit) his general distaste for large scale game development now because of how much time and money goes into creating all the content a game requires, and why he's decided he wants to work on smaller games. For someone like him that's aware of how expensive and time-consuming it is to use the amount of space provided by a format like HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, it's not remotely suprising that he thinks putting it in the PS3 was a bad idea.
In comparison, it's quite easy for Sony execs to ramble on about the promise of Blu-Ray and how it enables developers to make games, because if you don't understand something it's easy to lie about it and still look sincere.
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Dave, please see me in my office ASAP.
Also, do you have any empty cardboard boxes near your desk? If so, don't throw them away just yet. They may come in handy.
-- Phil H.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
A Blu-Ray win is probably more valuable to Sony than a gaming console win, the market for movies is simply bigger and if high def DVD movies take over the DVD market a win here is very important to Sony. Since the bundling of the PS3 and Blu-Ray are doing really well for Blu-Ray (so far), I would think that Sony got this one right. We'll see if time will tell, but I think the developers opinion is pretty much irrelevant for the moment and the PS3 price will eventually come down.
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
I'm waiting for Sony "X-Ray" technology to come out - You get 1Tb per disc, and the disc only needs to be sitting on top of the drive to be readable!
"but as a game disc format that provides game developers with plenty of storage space to build highly detailed game worlds without the need for multiple discs."
This is total garbage. Swapping disks isn't that difficult and happens infrequently if done correctly.
Everytime we get a larger format, we get a slower drive. The PS2 when it came out wasn't as fast as it's CD counter parts. And the blue-ray and hd drives are not as fast as DVD drives now.
It's all a gimmick - Sony wants to push their format. Unfortunately the didn't recognize that general consumer is unwilling to bankroll the rollout of their next generation format.
Blueray is a choice and not a standard at this point, as a consumer I object to paying for technology that may or may not emerge as the prevailing format simply because sony thinks it's best. In addition sony's drive quality is not what it used to be (PS2 spin of death).
Overall the justifications for rolling out Blue-ray in the PS3 just don't hold water.
The PS3 is a great BD player for the price. I own one and rarely play games on it. But boy, with netflix already renting out BD films, it's been a great time to watch movies!
If they were discounting them to 399.99 pounds, they were overpriced in the first place. Oh forgot you guys spend pounds like we spend dollars. 4 pounds for a pint, 4 dollars for a pint in the US of the same size. Granted, the beer is better in the UK so I guess it does even out don't it?
Not unless you're at a really shitty overpriced club. Beer is, on average, £2.50 a pint at most. But yes, we do get screwed on everything electronics related to the tune of one dollar = one pound.
Le Ray Est Mort ... Vive Le Ray!
To my knowledge the PS3 is not powerful enough to even take minimal advantage of the huge amount of space provided by blu-ray
It is nonsensical to say that something isn't "powerful enough" to use storage space, so I guess I don't know what you really meant to say.
However, I'd like to point out that there were games for the PS2 that spanned multiple DVDs, so the demand for media bigger than a single DVD already existed with the previous generation of consoles.
*sigh* back to work...
Its relatively easy to predict the short term gains and how these decisions affect its current market. However, if you are hoping for a very long lasting system, the choice to include Blue-Ray becomes harder. Sony is correct in the statement that games are requiring more space as years pass on, and I for one would prefer to only have one disk. At what cost am I will to pay for it? Also, am I willing to pay a higher price now so I dont have to later on?
:)
To me the question is more about timing, is it the right time for Blue-Ray. This is a hard question. Its been stated that the PS3 has helped increase Blue-Ray sales making it harder for HD to become the accepted standard. Which means delaying it might have hurt it later on.
As for paying a higher price now? Most Americas can not see the benefits in this because its a risk that may not turn out. Add to the fact that technology is changing and the PS3 becomes a harder selling point. On top of this, the Wii has changed the market a little hence causing it to become harder to see the benefits now. Personally, I think Sony should have seen the Wii coming or the style of it coming and included some similar ideas.
What cost? This is a hard one to answer because it depends on the disposable income people have. The more they have of it means the more likely they will take the risk. The less they have of it, the more likely they will go with something else. Add to this, the games I want to play and how bad do I want to play them. Example: Halo and the X-box.
So I do see them starting off bad. Can they recover? Time will tell as well as other things like games, style of play, and perhaps unseen events. I think they are willing to take the risk and start off with fewer sales in the hope they dont have to do much other then focus on good games for the system in the long run. Is it better to focus on one thing at a time and get it right before moving on to another item? Time will tell. Did they get it right?
Personally, I will like to come back to this topic in 5 years and see how it all turns out. After all, we are currently in the making of how it will turn out. Got to like that!!
So already a launch title is almost filling up an entire BluRay disk (if it had included both PAL and NTSC video instead of converting NTSC on the fly). A single Dual Layer DVD wouldn't have been able to hold all of Resistance, and probably 2 wouldn't either (remember a good bit of the data would have to be on both disks!). Odds are as more games are developed for the PS3 more and more will come close to needing Dual Layer BluRay disks (50 GB).
Also your comment about the PS3 not being powerful enough makes ZERO sense (data transfer rate would have been a better argument...)
One thing to keep in mind is that these are the comments of the content *Producer*. Jaffe and crew don't see a dime in the success of Blu-Ray so he don't have to give a damn which media format wins. What he does have to be concerned with is the target console's market penetration -- not many devices to read his content in the homes, not much content gets sold.
When the things on the top-10 lists of the new formats are barely pushing 1000 units a week, what's the incentive to produce content on them? If I were selling something I'd made, I'd want to hit the biggest market possible. Right now, the prohibitive costs that the blu-ray format incurs on the PS3 console are limiting that market, so content producers are going to be understandably pissed. Unless Sony's subsidizing development costs for exclusive titles, which I doubt they'd do if they're already taking a hit on the consoles *and* taking licensing fees on the back end.
This is funny, as I remember saying a similar thing 10 years ago, as I thought PC development should concentrate on making games that could be easily downloaded over a 14.4k modem for ease of distribution. Doom did well out of that idea.
Resistance: Fall of Man uses more than a DVD's worth of space.
Game artists are working with master art that takes up many more times the amount of space even available on a Blu-Ray disc. If you let them, they will fill it. That does not make by itself for a better game, but if used well can add a lot of atmosphere to an already great game. I'm really looking forward to seeing what the makers of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus do with this...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes, "there were games". But how well did they do? Just because the games exist does not necessarily mean there is a high demand for them. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that most of these were role-playing games (bad ones, at that - the Xenosaga series comes to mind) wherein the only reason multiple discs was necessary was to store the data for the cut-scenes contained in the game. From what I see at Metacritic, none of the 62 games with a score of 90 or above are more than one disc (many of them are even on CD format)
The point is, I can fill up my entire hard-drive with a blank screen in raw AVI data if I wanted to. Anyone can fill up a giant amount of space and make "use" of it. It's not a question of the PS3's capabilities, it's a question of are game developers going to use the Blu-Ray format to its full potential? If you ask me, no way. At least, not yet. In the gaming industry, deadlines are way too short (right now, anyway) to be able to attain a standard like this.
This is total garbage. Swapping disks isn't that difficult and happens infrequently if done correctly.
I have played games with multiple discs. What "happens infrequently" translates to, is that there is some event in the game world that cannot be reversed or recovered from, that you play first all on one disc, and then on the second one until the game is done.
You can minimize disc swapping, but it comes at the expense of non-linearity. A game does not have to be non-linear to be fun (plenty of very linear games are great) but it does mean sandbox games have to suffer the constraint of space instead of allowing them a broader range of content to roam in without swapping.
Furthermore, what you are not factoring in is the per-unit costs that multiple discs entail - you are doubling pressing costs, and also increasing case costs as well (though that is more minimal). Since that is a physical per-unit cost it means you have even more units to sell before you break even, so studios would far rather cut content or increase compression than go to a two-disc solution - not to mention the design costs of deciding you need two discs mid-stream and the extra work that takes.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So they cut 6 gigs by removing duplicate pre-rendered movies? That means there are around 6 gigs of pre-rendered movies left on the disc. Are all those movies really needed? How good have they been compressed? How much of the rest of the data on the disc is compressed? I guess that they could probably get it down to a normal dual-layer dvd disc if they really wanted to.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
I don't own a PS3 and don't plan to buy one, but I took note of his comments on Calling All Cars, where he said that since it wasn't going to sell to Soccer Moms anyways, they should have made it edgier. I don't think alienating people who aren't in your target demographic is the same as improving the product for your target demographic.
Then again, I'm a mid-20s male anime fan who can hardly watch anime targeted at the mid-20s male anime fan anymore because of the preponderance of moé. Maybe I'm an outlier in every culture's model of what people my age want.
What sound do people on rollercoasters make? Hint: it's not Xbox 360.
Everytime we get a larger format, we get a slower drive. The PS2 when it came out wasn't as fast as it's CD counter parts. And the blue-ray and hd drives are not as fast as DVD drives now.Okay, we've had a medium that could hold ~30GB this whole time. It's called tape. They are slow as all hell, but they get the job done reliably. Blu-ray is much faster than that.
Moreover, the major CD counterparts to the PS2 were:
Sega Saturn (previous gen)
PSX (previous gen)
PC (not a console)
Sega Dreamcast (I don't want to get into whether or not CD killed it)
With Xbox and GCN using DVD-level technology, the capacity definitely was something that trumped the previous generation, I'd say.
Blueray is a choice and not a standard at this point
Blu-ray is beating the tar out of HD-DVD, and it is a standard even if it isn't the standard choice. It will have a problem beating out DVD, but unlike people like to post on Digg and slashdot, they forget that Blu-ray is much more conducive to foreign languages (HD-DVD is a real bitch to say in Japanese, and doesn't translate into French very kindly... not that that's what they'd call it over there, but still).
At the end of the day, people will want the better goods offered by the higher capacity at a reasonable speed. It doesn't have to be as fast, it just has to be reasonable and around for long enough. DVD's came out a long time ago. They didn't really take off until a few years later (and PS2 being a cheap, acceptable DVD player played a big part in that).
If you remember the transition to CD-ROM based gaming from cartridge based, a lot of the first CD-ROM games were the same crappy things but with video and CD sound. It's easy to pad out the size of the game with that stuff. The first games were, what, early '90s?
Even as late as 1997 you had games like Final Fantasy VII where "WHOA! IT TAKES THREE DISCS!" was a bit of a deception when the actual game content fit on one disc and the sequence of three was only required due to, you guess it, space-filling movies.
In fact, there are still DVD games with dummy files. What's a dummy file? Well, as you know, if a disc spins at a constant angular velocity (which is much simpler to implement in hardware than the alternative constant linear velocity) then more sectors pass over the lens per unit of time the farther out from center it is. Game developers then, to speed up reading from media, would push all the important stuff close together on the outside of the discs. You can't really do that, however, since the standards all have the tracks starting from the center of the disc. The clever way to do it was place a several gigabyte "dummy" file full of data that the game will never read or use. It's purpose was only to provide a platform far away from the center of the disc where REAL content could be housed.
There are games now that can take up both layers on a DVD for a total of 8.5 Gigs, but should that REALLY count as a 8.5 Gig game when half of the disc on both layers is just a completely unnecessary file? With the power of real-time generated graphics on today's systems I'd even argue that pre-rendered video at any compression on disc is about as wasteful.
More Twoson than Cupertino
There is a reason there is only a small minority of console games that ship on multiple disks. Disk swapping is not fun.
Neither are long, pointless cinematics. I wonder how big those titles would be without cinematics, or with cinematics rendered by the game engine?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Honestly, why wouldn't we use the space? If we're suddenly going from the average TV set having a 480i resolution to 720p, 1080i, or 1080p, we're going to want better textures. The only way that we can fit more textures in game is to increase storage capacity, either via disk or hard drive. How many games would it take to fill up a 60GB hard drive? How long does it take to install a game? The answers are "too quickly" followed by "not fast enough." When people buy a game, they don't want to have to wait to install it, they want to play right away. Plus, if they have many games, it doesn't take much effort to fill up 60GB. Just look at how much space Half Life 2, along with CS:source, DOD:source, Doom 3, et al use up. Consumers would complain like crazy if they had to uninstall one game to play another. Moreover, you aren't burdened to excessive downloads to retrieve more data. By having the storage media be removable, this is bypassed by longer loading times.
Sure, we won't use it right away, but the idea is to futureproof the damn thing. Did we originally have all of the PS2 games on DVD's? I seem to remember the earlier Madden games for PS2's still being on CD's....
....that Hideo Kojima is already complaining of needing more space. He like the fact that Blu Ray is in the PS3. It is one of the reasons reason that MGS4 is not going to be on 360. I like Jaffe as a game dev, but Kojima kicks his ass. I would go with Kojima's opinion before Jaffe. That is just my 2 cents adjusted for inflation.
We have no way of knowing if Sony would subsidize the ps3 as much as it is now without the blu-ray. At release the components themselves for the system alone was $300 over retail (search isuppli's data on next-gen.biz). Add in packing, controller, cables, manuals, etc it was probably closer to $350 over. They priced the ps3 at $499 and $599 because that is what they believed the limit would be for consumers to except such a system. How do we know sony would still take such a hit without blu-ray. They may have still decided that consumers would be willing to buy their system for $499 and $599 and just minimized their loss by a hundred dollars.
Blu-ray components at release was $125 dollars. It's safe to assume that dvd components are at least $20 so at most they'd have saved $105 and if they kept the same price point they'd still be losing more per system then they have for either the psx or ps2 (both were slightly profitable on the sale of each console after about on million units).
Plus thats onyl a short term money savings, bleeding edge technology goes down in price the fastest.
Hmmm... Pie...
Developers will surely find ways to fill out Blu-Ray discs, just wait and see. However my personal theory of the inclusion of Blu-Ray in the PS3 is that it was forced upon the Playstation division by the home entertainment and movie divisions in exchange for supporting the development costs and adopting the Cell in future products. This is completely unsupported by evidence, but IIRC Blu-Ray support for the PS3 was first announced around the time of the Sony exec reshuffle where Kutaragi was first demoted.
So any game that reviewers didn't give a 90% to or above on Metacritic is automaticaly "bad"? Actually, the Xenosaga series sold fairly well and I'd say it's one of the better RPGs out there for consoles; episode 1 on Metacritic actually scored 83...a mere 7 points from your much vaunted 90%; overall the series scored 79%. Let's face it, games are getting bigger, a lot bigger; in the not so-distant future, I think it will be standard for console games to need at least two DVDs worth of space.
Will game designers be able to fill up an entire Blu-Ray disc in the near future? No. But at some point in the near future, that extra space is going to be pretty damn handy.
A lot of people like good cinematics. A lot of people play games for a good story, not just for good game play. If you're not in that market, don't buy those games. If you don't believe me, then look at the sales figures for FFX or something.
What I'd like to see is a lot more very high resolution textures and some more cool dynamic ones (like TV screens with actual shows on them when you walk into a room). I hate walking up to an Aylid doorway in Oblivion and seeing pixels the size of my finger on the screen (although most textures in the game are excellent, they aren't great close up).
With extra space to spare, you can use lossless codecs both for audio and image data instead of lossy ones, higher quality textures and audio samples, more diverse textures for more situations and more high-quality footage for FMV sequences as well.
Do I want to play 7th guest again? No, never, thank god the early CD game days are over. Will there be those "look, we filled a 50GB disc" games? Yes. Does that take away from the space having value? No.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I've only come across a few RPGs that spanned multiple DVDs - and multi-disc RPGs aren't anything new.
Even then, this is a pretty small number when you consider how many multi-disc games there were for the PS1. Also consider that two of the better release titles for the PS2 came on DVD (DOA, SSX) and both clearly showed that DVD was needed for games due to its larger storage capacity. Event then, most PS2 games barely necessitated a dual-layer disc, so I really don't see the pressing need for the jump from DVD to blu-ray.
Even the PS3's flagship launch title, Resistance: Fall Of Man, which was supposed to show the world once and for all why Blu-Ray was needed for this generation. However it was discoverd that the game was so large because it had replicated files around the disc in order to reduce seek times in the PS3's relatively slow Blu-Ray drive.
None of the other PS3 launch titles came close to filling up a DVD's worth of space, much less the more expensive blu-ray discs they were using.
I don't know where this came from, but please stop using "price point." This is worthless business speak that has gone mainstream. Just use price. Saying "price point" does not make the consumer forget that something costs money.
How often do you swap discs in a game anyways? Once every, what, 15-20 hours? Oh, you poor baby.
And usually the game is designed so that once you move from disc one to disc two, you don't need to insert disc one anymore.
Come on now, multi-disc games have been a fact of life on consoles ever since the CD drive arrived.
I'm no hardware engineer, but would the presence of hdd help in the average disc reading speed?
Instead of installing some files to the disc, how about if the Ps3OS set up a swap space, where the games could cache most used files like textures and such on the fly.
Like a virtual(or paginated) memory, Would this be possible in the ps3? Would it be stupid?
Resistance: Fall of Man used a little over 20 gigs on the blu-ray disc, if i had a PS3 i would be grateful to have that all on one disc and not have to swap out ever couple levels. It may not be a necessity, just like when CDs came out you could get by with installing off of 20+ floppies... it's just a nice convenience that i am surprised everyone gets so upset about.
And for the record i have neither PS3, Xbox360 or Wii, so i'm not trying to stick up for anyone and say anyone is better than anyone else.
that they need the amount of space Blu-Ray provides.
To my knowledge there aren't any 2 disk 360 games (or even any DVD based games that immediately spring to mind). Two reasons spring to mind, 9gig is enough for a game and/or publishers don't want you to be able to give a disk to your mate when you've gone passed half way. Oh and whilst on the subject, I was under the impression that PS3 cached to the HD as the transfer speed on Blu-Ray wasn't quite up to it (I seem to remember reading somewhere that you could get data off a 360 DVD faster with X gen DVD drive faster than you could on PS3s 1st gen Blu-Ray). Secondly, in this age of increasing dev costs, does Sony can produce enough 'game data' to fill a BR disk and make a profit?
Isn't it amazing how geeks are the most resistent to change? While the "unwashed masses" are more open. And to add insult to injury, the "unwashed" are suppose to be going to geeks for technical advice on what to buy.
The question isn't whether developers can fill a blu-ray disc or not. For instance, take something like Xenosaga, and remaster its 5 hours(?) of cutscenes into HD and you'll probably end up with a 50GB game.
What I want to see is title that clearly couldn't be fit onto a single DVD due to the game itself - not the fact that it contains 15GB of cutscenes...
Think about it this way:
n try.php?topic_id=23916169&user=skektek it seems that the drive's disc read rate is quite favorable against DVD's read speed.
I could release my game on a single DVD by compressing every file gzip or equiv. compression schemes, or I could release a bluray disk with all the assets uncompressed. This would lower CPU usage substantially while asset loading, but it incurs the overhead of aprox. 2x I/O read times. So, the question is which is the biggest slowdown (remembering that the seek times are identical in this case)?
Seeing just briefly from http://www.gamespot.com/pages/profile/show_blog_e
What this means to me is that developers could just get rid of compressed assets from their software in order to boost the speed of games with no side effects. I'm not going to say this speedup is worth $200, thats a personal value judgment and has no place in an technical discussion.
Just because I think the BluRay has merit, I'm not a flipping PS3 fan. I don't and will not be buying a PS3, not because it doesn't have impressive hardware, but because the game genres represented most don't seem interesting.
Bye!
How would I see my troll's bloodshot eyes sparkle as he squeezes the puss from his face?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A lot of people watch Days of Our Lives for the story as well, and I make fun of them just as viciously. A crappy story doesn't care what medium uses it, but the medium I care about has enough crappy stories to last you JRPG fans a lifetime already. Quit polluting my game shelves with your bad taste.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
The seventies called...
English beer is swill. 'Watney's Red Barrel' is easily a match for Bud for its gag inducing quality.
Granted they don't have anything as lame a Spoors light, but who drinks that?
Give me a nice fresh local copy of 'Pilsner Urquel'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
They need to hire better compression coders. I worked on a game once that needed better compression. We got it to fit on a single DVD. Uncompressed it would have been around 50gb. Dual-layer DVD is 8.5gb of space, so what they're saying is that they needed to compress it from 30gb to 25.5gb. Somehow I'm just not that impressed.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
I'm totally fucking confused here. I have mod points, and yet I don't know what to do with them. You've really made this hard.
... this is +5 Insightful. +6 even. Is there a way to maybe highlight the relevant text and mod that part up, thus ignoring all the nonsensical crap that has to share tenancy with the special stuff? ...
"I guess the interesting thing to consider is with all this extra space, is it really needed in the PS3."
This is kinda stupid. It's HD gaming, they want as much space as they can. But in theory - and possibly Xbox fanboy land - it could start working it's way towards a valid point. You know, with a bit more background than a vague question, sans question mark. I don't know colin, is it that interesting a thing to consider, I mean, you're only guessing, and yet you raised the point.
"To my knowledge the PS3 is not powerful enough to even take minimal advantage of the huge amount of space provided by blu-ray."
This is mind-bogglingly, galactically, weapons-grade retarded. If it were at all possible possible to a) make less sense than this and b) make it any more obvious you have zero fucking idea about anything you're talking about, I'm unaware of it.
"Or is this just another way to sell movies."
Yet this
"Earth Defence Force 2017 is a pretty basic game, it has sprite icons for bonus pickups, zero story line, very simple shooting mechanics, and yet, I get to shoot 8 story tall robots in the junk "
You know, I think this could work.
It is possible to eat that much space. I worked on a game that ate 8.5gb, after heavy compression, mostly on level textures. We had lighting baked into the texture and it honestly looked great. I suspect there are other high-end effects that you could do with huge amounts of space far more efficiently than trying to generate them in realtime (which simply wouldn't have been viable for us.)
On the other hand, I suspect most studios don't bother with that.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
I've heard that the XBox and XBox360 already do this. No, it's not stupid, and yes, it would be quite possible.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
The PS3 does this already. The 360 does as well - assuming you have a HDD attached.
Even so, reading data off the PS3's blu-ray drive is slower than reading it from the 360's drive, which could cause some performance differences when the data is first written to the HDD.
Well, how much sense would it make to place a dvd-drive on a 386SX? (33Mhz for those that don't know)
Not saying what he said was right, just saying that there are devices that can't make adequate use of a ton of storage...
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
JRPG fans are not automatically fans of Squeenix's crap. Surprisingly few JRPGs are in the Final Fantasy/Xenosaga school of cinematics abuse. Those are just the ones that get all the press.
Well, how much sense would it make to place a dvd-drive on a 386SX? (33Mhz for those that don't know)
Not saying what he said was right, just saying that there are devices that can't make adequate use of a ton of storage...
Depends on what your doing. Lets say we have a 386sx with all the drivers and OS support for DVD. And all we're doing on the 386 is doing is displaying a 64x64 movie no buffereing linearly. And then you claim it's not powerful enough to use the storage, well for this task it's fine. yes that statement in general is indeed stupid. The two aren't so directly related. My PIII 450 can indeed eat up and utilize a full 40 gig HD. My PIII 450 is not as powerful in most ways then a PS3, and the HD is smaller then the BD. So in context the statement was stupid. Big ole textures will inflate the size of a game and require very little extra work since most artists do things in very high definition and shrink them, as well as 7.1 audio requiring more space, various bump maps and light maps too, HD increases all the media require to be 6-8 times in size and HD video is 6-8 times larger, more polies means mroe textures which mean more space etc.... So specifically that statement was stupid.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Quite a few games, going back to the days of the Dreamcast, take up way more space on the disc that in used for anything meaningful (e.g. audio tracks uncompressed, art assets that aren't used in the game, data repeated in multiple places on the disk to allow for faster loading times, even data that was just junk to make it harder to illegally copy the game so it wouldn't fit on a regular CD), I expect that's what's going on with Resistance if the image does take up that much space.
I do see the argument that it's easier for content producers if they don't have to spend time optimising data just because the medium is limited - or at least I could, if it were not the case that the PS3 only has 256 MB RAM (half that of the X-Box 360), which is obviously a limiting factor on the resolution of textures that can be used (and, IIRC it's VRAM but also shared for main memory), so it's not like the texture quality (and hense file size) on games on the PS3 is even able to match that of a high end PC title (even though in practice it will look just fine when it's up on a TV a few feet away from you). it's just a nice convenience that i am surprised everyone gets so upset about. I think that stems from it being the reason the console was delayed for over a year here, and why it's so expensive, and the consequent feeling that it's supposed to beneficial for gamers is just BS, it's really just benifical to Sony in getting Blu Ray established in the home (and fighting off HD DVD).
Try to play a new DVD on a first gen DVD player, then come and talk to me about future proof.
And if you dont think they cut any quality corners on their PS3 BluRay Drives then you are even crazier than I had thought. Really, how long until these rushed out blue lazer diodes start failing?
As far as the PS2 and DVD goes... DVD players were available for a quite a while and had realistic manufacturing costs for such a 'mainstream' machine like a game console. BluRay is just not there, they wanted to avoid yet another format failure so they shoved it down the throat of their 'hardcore' fans, and no one else is buying into the BS.
that cached any data like that to the hard drive was Oblivion. And Bethesda said they did that in the 360 version too. Those are pretty much lies.
And have you ever thought that the reason people stick to the 9 gigs on Sony ports is because they really don't want to pay to produce the extra content? I would probably argue that the 360 is limiting the space to 9 gigs before I argued that the BluRay is way too big to be filled. The same thing has been said about CDs and DVDs. It's moot to try and even argue it anymore.
Every extra penny you spend is one less penny in profits, per unit. It's not like other costs that spread out the more units you sell.
As for pressing costs, I'm not so sure you can press two DVD's for the price of one Blu-Ray anymore - thanks to the PS3 and movie sales, there have been a fair number of discs pressed and the pressing costs are going down pretty rapidly. Eventually they are predicted to reach DVD pressing prices, and then my point stands - which is important as I am talking about long-term viability of having to use two discs for large games over the entire life of a console, not just the first year.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
yeah, what is up with the ridiculous loading times on PS3 games... anyone who has played Motor Storm knows. I remember reading the tech-specs for ps3's data transfer rates, they were great. but what is the point if there's a huge bottleneck reading from the Blu-ray drive?
Furthermore, is 1080p that much of an improvemet? When is it TOO high-def? I dont need ( or want ) to see induvidual pores on 007's face in a BR Casino Royale, the same applies to texture maps.
I chose isuppli's data because they get component costs pretty accurate and often from suppliers for the components themselves. And no sony does NOT make everything in house. They maybe a large electronics manufacturer but they are outsourcing a lot of chip production and motherboard assembly. During release Sony had asustek make a lot of the PS3 boards. I believe they've added another OEM since then but I don't recall which one.
Hmmm... Pie...
The thing is if PS3 does'nt have Blu-Ray there will be tons of letters condemning PS3 as no better than a 360. What Blu-Ray provides the PS3 is product differentiation. Face it, (given time) anything that the 360 can do, so will the PS3. The online experience, the games, the graphic will improve. But one thing that the 360 can't have is all that extra gigabytes space that Blu-Ray provides. By the 2007 Christmas, Spider-Man 3 and Pirates Of The Carribbean 3 will help sell a few millions unit of PS3. By 2008 AAA for PS3 will take advantage of the the extra storage. I'm not talking just about games. In case of multiplatform, the PS3 version can includes, demo, trailers, developers diaries without hogging all those precious bandwith through downloading. One thing I enjoy with DVDs is the directors commentary. Imagine the developer of Okami talking about their original realistic version and why they abandon it. Things that can be included, the 360 version will be gimped by comparison.