Blue-ray 'Not a Burden' For Sony

Via Opposable Thumbs, an article at GamePro in which Phil Harrison clarifies that Blue-ray on the PS3 is a 'game design' decision. From the article: "Once we had that storage capacity on Blu-ray Disc, adding the movie playback functionality was extremely cost-effective, [the cost] is actually non-existent. So games like Resistance which, as a launch title, is up to 20-something gigabytes already. And that's day one -- think about four years, six years from now. We'll be pushing the 50 gigabyte limit with dual-layer Blu-ray very quickly. So we absolutely need it as game designers, and in that regard, the consumer is getting the movie functionality effectively for free." I probably would have had a follow-up question there, but that's where the interview ends. So what do you think? Which came first for Sony: Blue-ray as new movie media, or Blu-ray as answer to design challenges?

That's nice

[Dan East]

Okay, so now they can include gigs of FMV, just so the majority of players (especially kids) can hit a button and skip right over it. Yep, that definitely justifies the extra storage, and the associated costs and delays.

What I want to know is how the extra storage enhances gameplay?

Dan East

Movies first

[Wind_Walker]

Sony is repeating their past efforts. The PS2 won wide acceptance in part because it was a very cheap (at the time) DVD player. I believe that in Japan, a PS2 was actually priced lower at launch than any other DVD player available in Japan, so thousands of people picked it up simply for DVDs, and the games were an afterthought.

Sony is taking the same strategy this time around. Blu-Ray is Sony's technology and they NEED it to succeed. History is not on their side though - Betamax, MiniDisc, UMD... Sony just can't get their formats off the ground. Their solution? Package it in with their most popular product, the PS3. That ensures that there will be more Blu-Ray capable DVD players than HD-DVD players in households, thus ensuring that Blu-Ray will earn top billing and finally make Sony some money.

Will it work? Time will tell, but I doubt it - the $600 price tag is simply too high for most people to justify.

So, to answer the question, Blu-Ray came first, and Sony is trying to justify their huge price by claiming that it was needed by game designers. It's not.

Re:Movies first

[Anonymous Coward]

Sony is repeating their past efforts. The PS2 won wide acceptance in part because it was a very cheap (at the time) DVD player. I believe that in Japan, a PS2 was actually priced lower at launch than any other DVD player available in Japan, so thousands of people picked it up simply for DVDs, and the games were an afterthought.

I know that everyone has claimed this for the longest time, but I think that the number of people that purchased a PS2 because it was a low cost DVD player was pretty small; in fact, I suspect this rumor started because Dreamcast fanboy's used to bug PS2 fanboys about how few good games there were for the PS2 and PS2 fanboys would reply "Yeah, but it plays DVDs too". In the history of gaming there have been several systems (Sega CD, Panasonic CDI, Turbo Graphics 16) that had a new optical format and were less expensive than stand alone players yet the only one that anyone claims was popular because of it was the PS2.

The fact is that if you eliminate HD-FMV (which shouldn't be necessary on either the PS3 or XBox 360 with the capabilities of those systems) there is very little data in a game that will take up more than a DVD (or Two).

Re:Sounds like so much BS to me.

[rherbert]

We're forced to pay an extra $300 so that game dev's can be lazy with their compression methods.

Running at 1080p widescreen instead of 480p standard means that there's 6.75 times more data (1920x1080 vs 640x480). Are you saying that game developers who are currently filling up DVDs for PS2 and XBox games should suddenly have compression algorithms that are 6.75 times more efficient? Or would you like swapping out 7 DVDs?

Re:That's nice

[Intellectual Elitist]

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for the PS2 already uses almost an entire DVD layer (4+ GB), and it doesn't have any in-game FMV. It also compresses the crap out of all of its audio, and often doesn't play its radio songs in their entirety. You push a game like that to next-gen levels and you'll already need 6 times the space for textures just to maintain their per-pixel quality in HD, and you'll probably want to ease up on the audio compression across the board as much as you can. Then factor in the extra geometry and texture volume to give things that "next-gen sheen", and it's not hard to see how the game could easily exceed the capacity of even a double-layer DVD.

Higher storage capacity for consoles is definitely a good thing. It's not yet required for a lot of game types, but for certain ones it definitely is, unless you're ready to make obvious compromises.

Re:"Need" or "want"?

[Saige]

Many games, to make development easier, will include multiple copies of their various assets on the disc.

I've heard multiple game devs say that if the guys really do have 20 gigs of UNIQUE content on the disc for Resistance, then the rest of the game industry will bow down to them as game development gods.

Re:Sounds like so much BS to me.

[powerlord]

I'm willing to bet that you will start seeing multiple DVD games, and now that 360's are going to get HD players there will be two options for distribution.

Except that MS has repeatedly said that the HD-DVD player will be for movies only (effectively irrelevant for games). This means there is only one option for game distribution... DVD.

UNLESS ... they split the cinematics and game-play so the game-play is on a DVD and goes in the 'main' XBox360 drive, and the cinematics are on an HD-DVD and go in the add-on drive. I doubt this is going to happen though, since it would mean a game is limiting its potential buyer pool to those who purchased the external drive, and if MS *do* start including the HD-DVD drive as the primary drive in the unit (which I'm not convinced they will), then the system would mean swapping out the disk for every cut-scence ... a tad cumbersome (but then again if the system can do that then you can also include a DVD version of the cut scenes for those without an HD-DVD drive).

In the end its easier to just make the game span multiple DVDs and bite the bullet. The problem is, how will that brake up the pacing, and how will that look when the PS3 games come out on one disk and deliver that much more space to the developer to work with?

I think the XBox360 was an interesting design, but I'm not sure MS is used to thinking in terms of decade long cycles between updates for hardware (software can be patched now).
The Wii decided on 'low-tech' graphics and the system seems to operate well within those goals, competing on game-play and the controller.
The PS3 decided on 'high-tech' graphics and the system seems geared to support that goal.
The XBox360 started out competing against the PS2, but I'm not sure it can compete against the PS3 as well (I'm not sure its hardware will support the run for high-end graphics, and it's already committed itself to that marketplace).

I'm also not sure how XBox fans will take the console being abandoned very quickly ... especially after the relatively abbreviated life-span of the original XBox. If the XBox360 is abandoned after 3-5 years, then it could make the cost of the PS3, with an expected 'lifetime' of 10 years much more attractive.

After all, don't most console gamers tout the fact that they don't need to keep 'upgrading' as one of the advantages of Consoles over PC gaming?

Re:Sounds like so much BS to me.

[ifrag]

Yea... but remember a vital restriction on the disc swapping setup. The fact that disc swap games are at least to a point, linear. And that is what allows them to set up the game like that.

Take a final fantasy game for example. At some point in a disc change, some content becomes unavailiable. Now I'm sure a fair amount of that space is FMV's, and most of the game engine / world can be duplicated (more wasted space btw since it has to be on every disc). As a general rule, most FMV's also only play a single time as they are typically plot advancing in nature rather than some repetitive situation the player would find themselves in. I can think of maybe a couple spots where they would reuse one, but usually it's a one time viewing thing.

Now lets say we want to make a game where the player has access to essentially all content at the same time, and to populate the entire world we need say 4 DVD's to do so. Lets assume that there is a large world map, with many towns on it, and the player can rapidly fly to any town in an airship in a short amount of time. Lets assume a single disc can hold 10 towns and 10 dungeons worth of information in any combination, and that players can be expected to go to any random location at any point in time. Imagine that in the worst case scenario every time you enter a town or go to a dungeon you are asked to swap discs. Doesn't exactly sound like fun does it?