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."

Comments

Of course he would

[JanusFury]

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.

Re:Is the space really needed in the PS3

[Dan Ost]

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.

Disc swapping is a design constraint

[SuperKendall]

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.