Did the PS3 really need a Blu-ray drive?

[MasterChief]

I think its shocking just how small most PS3 games are, the games uploaded to the internet at the moment could quite easily fit on to a DVD. Yet the PS3 has a Blu-ray drive which has low read speeds forcing many games to have mandatory installs...

I think the PS3 would have done a lot better if it was released without the Blu-ray drive, it could have retailed at a much cheaper price without one allowing more people to buy a PS3.

Alot of people do not have HDTV's, even people who do likely don't have many Blu-ray movies, if any. So Blu-ray has done nothing for the console except make it significantly more and force games to be installed just to play them.

To show you what i mean have a look at the size of some of the games that can be downloaded at the moment, most would easily fit on a DVD:

What do you think, was Blu-ray a good or bad idea?

 

[Nimrod]

Without a doubt, its been said for years that the PS3 for the games aspect, did not need the blu-ray capacity. I think theres a couple of games where its needed, like Final Fantasy but thats because half the game is stupid uncompressed movie cut-scenes.

However, that's not the reason the PS3 had a Blu-ray drive. It was solely about the format war with HD-DVD, and putting it in the games console ensured it was the winning format. For HD-DVD, you had to buy a player, or an expensive add-on for the 360, wheres with the PS3 having blu-ray, meant millions of homes already had a suitable player. Without the PS3, people question if HD-DVD would have ever lost the format war, as it was the supiorer format in so many ways, cheaper costs, more than enough disk space and better interactive content.

So does the PS3 need Blu-ray for games? Not at all
But why does it have Blu-ray? Because it ensured Blu-ray won the format wars which insured Sony its maker, a steady income in royalties for many years to come for licensing blu-ray discs and players.

 

[Dark Scyth]

stupid uncompressed movie cut-scenes.

Its stupid to want to watch videos at a high quality? I thought that was the point of HDTV's, which you probably own one. I personally love watching videos at the highest quality possible whether its for games or movies.

As for the whole Blu-Ray ordeal, its not that it was mandatory, for the most part consoles add a bit of things that aren't mandatory. Of course every game doesn't need the whole 50GB for the most part developers put the games on all next gen consoles or at least the 360 and PS3. Its mostly the exclusives PS3 games that use the memory to the full extent. As for Final Fantasy XIII, on the 360 its 3 discs and for the PS3 its one Blu-Ray disc. That game is about 40GB or so, which even use Dual Layer of the disc, on the 360 it only takes about 18GB which you can tell it tremendously reduces the quality. Now games like Metal Gear Solid 4 technically took more then the whole Dual Layer disc, it was over 50GB and Kojima had to compress the audio files which he definitely wasn't happy about. If it wasn't for Blu-Ray discs he would of had to put the game on 5+ discs, which for these types of games no one wants to disc swap. It also lowers the piracy a bit as not very many people have a Blu-Ray burner or want to buy all those expensive discs. As you can see the exclusive games wouldn't fit on a HD DVD disc, like Uncharted 2 and Resistance 2, of course the quality could be reduced a little bit to fit on a HD DVD disc I know I like to play games at the highest quality possible.

Blu-Ray as a technology in the PS3 was a good idea but them using this to ensure that Blu-Ray was a better choice for everything, not so much.

 

[Nimrod]

Its stupid to want to watch videos at a high quality? I thought that was the point of HDTV's, which you probably own one. I personally love watching videos at the highest quality possible whether its for games or movies.

You don't need movie files (or even audio files) uncompressed to enjoy them in high quality. There are loss-less codecs and space savers. It's all about ensuring there isnt repeated data, for example if pixel 34,45,47,102,434 all were white for 5 seconds, why have the data for each frame saying there white, when you could just say "these pixels keep white". I know thats a terrible example, but its showing how a codec can keep quality, while saving disk space. Just look at ZIP files and RAR files, when you uncompress them, do you feel as if you don't have the whole original file? You did seem to miss the point i was making on the subject, while very few games did need more than a DVD, most never needed an entire blu-ray and those that did, could learn to use compression and manage disk space better. Gotta be worth it, seems Blu-Ray games cost more? No point in paying more when you don't need to, as a consumer I hate paying more.

Also when quoting me, try to keep the whole sentence, I was also complaining about how half the game was cut-scenes, hence needed a big disk and threw the uncompressed comment in, because it didnt need to be the full 40gb


Though this does remind me of the whole argument before blu-ray or hd-dvd launched of did we need them, Microsoft and a few other companies proved you could fit a whole 2 hour movie at 1080p on a normal DVD if you used a good encoding codec.

 

[Dark Scyth]

I understand the example and its not a bad one that makes sense. Its using the same data from previous clips so its reusing data instead of using new extra data. Codecs like this I wasn't aware of. As far as half the game being Cut Scenes, that goes with most RPG's. Like Lost Odyssey and especially Xenosaga (PS2). Xenosaga had hours and hours of clips in the game, its just how turn based RPGs have been for the most part. As far as Blu-Ray games costing more, they aren't much more then a 360 game and Sony partially took the approach of Blu-Ray for reduction of illegal production. As you and I know teams have hacked the 360 drives fairly quick and they have even hacked the Slim 360s disc drive to my knowledge. That is one thing that hasn't happened to PS3 yet, it probably will sometime especially with PS Jailbreak/Groove but it definitely put up a good fight for how long it is taking.

 

[Jourdan Cameron]

I think it's mostly about Sony trying to push their brand, really.
On another note, what about a console that will run on the HyperCD? When will that pop up? LOL, I kid, of course, though if developers could figure out how to use all that space well...

 

[BigRod989]

No Sony didn't need to put the Bluray in the Ps3 I'm glad they did because got to love the HD movies and really Bluray is a much better format then HD DVD just for the space of it, i know with my 360's i love just installing right to the hard drive and playing games that way if Ps3 could do that with out jailbreaking it would be great I upgraded the hard drive in my Ps3 Phat (backward compatible) from 80 gig to 160 just because of the game installs I didn't do that with my Ps3 slim because it has 120 gig, but the Bluray Vs. Hd dvd battle that's just like Beta Vs. Vhs someone had to win. If Microsoft had HD dvd built right in to the Console like Sony did the Ps3 with Bluray it might have been more of a battle also think what else they could add into the games part of the reason the games are small with the bluray disc is how its put on to the disc they spread the data out over the disc to fill the room so do Wii games I installed a wii game to my HDD and it took a whole 0.23gb on the hard drive what a waste of 4.3gb disc

 

[Dark Scyth]

Well Microsoft will be releasing a whole bunch of Kinect games with pathetic graphics, that will definitely be a waste of disc space. Obviously it just depends on the game, there were a couple of Wii games that took dual layer discs (Super Smash Bros Brawl, Metroid Other M, Metroid Trilogy and a couple others I think). Also when you think about it, its almost like Blu-Ray is equivalent to what was used on Wii games. As they release a lot of games that are only 4 - 7GB compared to the 25GB a single layer game can hold, well over 10GB wasted.

 

[BigRod989]

ya that's true about the space but really if the 360 and ps3 could both use up the room of a full bluray think about how much more they could do with games. I think part of the reason games end up small on the Blurays is because most the games are made for both consoles and to keep the games the same on both systems they limit the size they can't go over board for the Ps3 to use up the room if they can't do the same with the 360.

 

[delhanh]

Sony really didn't need to include blue-ray, but it was a major factor in the format war, which Sony has evidently been losing over the years
Year after year Sony has released failed formats:

Betamax (1975) - the cassettes contain 1/2-inch (12.7mm)-wide videotape, in 1977 rivalled by VHS
Mini-Disc (1991) - custom disc format, and used ATRAC audio compression, which is proprietary.
Sony Dynamic Digital Sound (1993) - a competitor to the Dolby Digital 5.1 standard.
Multi-Media Compact Disc (1994) - Sony's proprietary format for high-density optical storage, developed in conjunction with Phillips. Negotiations merged this format and Toshiba's Super Density disc format into what would become DVD.
Music Clip (1999) - Sony's first digital player, used ATRAC audio compression.
HiFD (1998) - a competitor to Iomega's Zip drive.
Memory Stick (1998) - proprietary memory device as a competitor to SD and Flash memory.
Super Audio CD (1999) - an optical disc format with higher fidelity than the CD.
UMD (2004) - It can hold up to 1.8 gigabytes of data, a proprietary media format.

A long history of failure has lead Sony to make the ps3 have blue-ray, so insure at-least one unique format of theirs exist.

 

[Dark Scyth]

Well, the Memory Stick and UMD weren't failures but everything else was, though I can say that Super Audio CDs were pretty good but no way it would really get anywhere and Atrac format is probably the best format for audio around for loss less compression anyways.

 

[BigRod989]

well the one thing that Sony did win on was with the first Playstation they stole the copyright right out from under nintendo and thats when Nintendo took a huge dive ill see if i can find the pics i used to have from when nintendo had what looked like the SNES ontop of a huge disc drive it was going to be a combo system but sony went and a copy right on the disc's and drive the day before nintendo went to because at the time both companys worked together to make it heres a wiki link with some info
PlayStation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Quote from wiki "The console's origins date back to 1986 where it was originally a joint project between Nintendo and Sony to create a CD-ROM for the Super Famicom/SNES console."


the first pic was what they were working on, the second pic is a N64 console with a disc drive they did make and launched in Japan only and failed hardcore. All because Sony going in 1 day before them and getting the copy right then the Ps1 was made lol, talk about a shady company

 

[Dark Scyth]

Its also worth noting that Final Fantasy VII was going to be made on the N64 with the disc add-on but obviously was later taken to Playstation (ok so its not all that worth noting but its interesting, to me anyways).

 

[BigRod989]

really here soon i think like next 2-4 years there will be no more disc based games they will all have to be download and stored on the systems them self's all ready see it starting with the PSP Go because there is no UMD drive and it has 16 gig memory built in and with a memory card that makes 32 gig hell half the games out there now you can download right to your systems and play never having a disc

 

[InsaneNutter]

Didn't the PSP Go fail pretty badly though?

Digital distribution is the future, however I don't think its going to kill disc based games in the next 2-4 years. Internet connections are still very slow in a lot of places around the world and have very low data transfer limits in many countries.

I dont realistically see many consumers downloading a 25gig game if there bandwidth limit for the month is 50gigs for example, that would limit peoples desire to buy games I would imagine.

Something like that would work right now in more developed nations like Japan and Korea where the majority of people have access to 100mbit+ internet at home.

 

[zefie]

most of those games listed tho are ports. Most multi-console games are developed for the xbox 360, due to the ease of Microsoft's dev tools (supposedly), then ported over to the PS3. Thus you have the original squished-for-dvd-dl content, maybe with some uncompressed textures, on a 25gb bluray. Mind you also all those are RARs so that is the compressed size.

I like the 360 better due to live, but let me tell you, multi-disc games like FF13 and especially annoying ones like Star Ocean 4, where they make you switch between 2 and 3, back and forth at the end on the 360... having those on one huge disc is so much more convenient.

the first pic was what they were working on, the second pic is a N64 console with a disc drive they did make and launched in Japan only and failed hardcore. All because Sony going in 1 day before them and getting the copy right then the Ps1 was made lol, talk about a shady company

Speculation. No where in that article does it say Sony 'stole' anything. Nintendo and Sony had an agreement, Sony made the hardware, Nintendo decided to go with Philips for some reason (probably a lower pricing agreement). Sony retained the copyright to the hardware they already created, thus modified it to be their own creation. The SNES Add-on was going to be called the "Play Station" (with a space).

If someone offered you money to make something, and you made it, then turned around and said "nah, nevermind, I'm going with this guy", wouldn't you want to profit off what you made?

 

[BigRod989]

the thing I read that said Sony stole the copyright was a few years about when Bluray beat HD DVD I read it on my Wii through the news channel then I will have to look around to see if I can find it again on the web

 

[Dark Scyth]

Yeah, the Go failed horribly, though thats because when you can purchase a 360, Wii or used PS3 for the same price why spend all the money for a Go. Especially if you already have a PSP system and some UMD's for it. Also 16GB? Why didn't they make it 32 or 64GB? PSP games can hold over 1.5GB, gamers are going to need more room.

 

[Fudge]

i think it was madcatz or any other company, anyways there planing to make a umd reader for the psp go but we still didnt here anything for a while

 

[Trebor]

i think it was madcatz or any other company, anyways there planing to make a umd reader for the psp go but we still didnt here anything for a while

Well with rumour of a PSP2 coming in the not too distant future I'd say that wouldn't be released or if it was I doubt it'd sell enough. I'm still a little disappointed that I bought a PSP as all the things I can now do with it no longer appeal to me on a portable Guess it's good for long journeys if I get bored of the games on my DS.