Blu-Ray Drive on PS3 – Extra Storage Space for Games

Someone told me today that the fact that Playstation 3s have a Blu-ray drive instead of a DVD one is a big selling point for game makers, because a Blu-ray drive has a storage capacity of arounf 50Gb, whereas a DVD has a capacity of about 8Gb, give or take.

He said it was better because the game makers can put more content on the discs, make the textures photo-realistic, add sound capacity for Dolby 7.1 surround, etc.

I disagreed for the following reasons:

First of all, I don’t think the 50Gb on Blue-ray discs is necessarily a good thing for the PS3. Because if you’re a games studio and making games that are 20, 30, 40 Gb in size then they’re going to take longer to code, longer to create the artwork for and longer to test. End result: your company makes fewer games per year than a company that’s making games that are 7Gb big. OK, the games you make will probably be fantastic, photo-realistic, great surround sound, etc. But if you’re going to get the same amount of money per unit for a 40Gb game or a 7Gb game, where would you pour your limited resources?

On the other hand, how many people have a surround sound system attached to their TV that will hook up to the console? Not many, I’ll bet because most people have paid a fortune for a LCD HD TV, the console, the games, the DVD player, etc. The surround sound is probably the first thing you’d knock off your shopping list.

It it needs it, why doesn’t the Xbox 360 use a multi-disc format for their games?

PC owners for years were able to put up with a multi disc game, before games came in PC-DVD ROM format. It was simply a matter of getting to a certain stage in the game and changing the disc. Granted a free roaming game would never work as a multi-disc game, but most linear games would be fine. I certainly wouldn’t mind paying a bit extra for a multi-disc game if it meant it would last longer and give me more gameplay.