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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."
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.
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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!
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...
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.
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
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
Well, as a Brit; I'm happy to use the current $->£ exchange rate to my advantage; even with shipping, it's often cheaper to buy goods from the USA; for example, I recently bought a "DS ONE" Supercard to run homebrew on my DS lite; importing it was significantly cheaper than buying it from the UK ("DS ONE" with 500mg Micro SD from US =~£37.00, the same from the UK without the Micro SD card was over £39.00). But at almost $2 to £1 that's to be expected.
It's not just electronic goods either, almost everything is cheaper in the states at the moment; hence my recent shopping spree over at thinkgeek.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
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...
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)