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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."
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.
"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.
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?
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...
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.
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