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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.
I guess the interesting thing to consider is with all this extra space, is it really needed in the PS3. To my knowledge the PS3 is not powerful enough to even take minimal advantage of the huge amount of space provided by blu-ray. Or is this just another way to sell movies.
.. 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!
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!!
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
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
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).
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...
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.
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.
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! --
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'
Well Jaffe is a GAMEdeveloper, and therefore he seems to forget that the PS3 is not a games only console (that's also the way Sony is marketing its console (not only for games)). For me as a movielover the PS3 is more interesting because of its BR than because of it's games.. But I wonder what he will say in 2 years when he needs more than 9GB of storage...
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
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.