Is Blu Ray Necessary for games

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Blu-Ray for games is an interesting subject because they say it gives developers more room to work with. But at the same time they hint at they dont have to use the same tree over and over in a game and you have basically unlimited capabilities for its space. But in the end if they do make games with that much space it will be full of CGI cutscenes (which japanese titles love to do)...I cant see to many games benefiting from it because it all comes down to the developer. If developers decide to make a GIGANTIC immersive game than not only will it take longer but will cost more in the end...


The price of Blu-Ray games are rumored to be 60 with special versions being 70....


I dont know a whole lot on the subject matter but it is a guarantee if developers are going to create more in-depth games than it will most likely cost more...I am interested to see how RockStar does GTA-IV with Blu-Ray I mean wasnt San Andreas long enough for everyone?

One thing it means is less time spent on optimizing code and and compression techniques. Just because a game's world is huge and there's a 100 things do doesn't necessarily relate to a game's physical data size.


Is it needed? Probably not at the moment. Could it be? Sure. Will it be? Who knows. No reason not to go with Blu Ray at this time. Only risk is the movie side of things could bomb and Sony wouldn't be able to tout it as much. Most consoles and gaming devices in history have used propriety media. This is very similar.


Even if a game was released that supposedly takes up 20 gigs (example), there's no way to know for sure if that couldn't have been done on a regular DVD. No way unless you're the developer to know how much code optimization could have been done given more time and the constraints of a 9gig DVD.

think 2K X 2K textures, HD multi surround sound, lots and lots of models, these things take up lots and lots of space.


Now, if the ps3 is powerful enough, where it could render extremely high quality stuff (large file sizes, especially uncompressed audio), and the amounts needed to warrent the extra space (lots and lots of assets), time will tell...


One thing that I'm liking is the regional free support, and possible support for all regions on one disk. Think of the possibilities! basically you can import from any region you want now, makeing those cool but region limited games easy to play on your new US region PS3 (if thats even the case anymore). On top of that, for a cheap cost, developers can put a modified version on the same disk for other regions, eve while releasing only in their prefered (letting import companies sell outside the region), and gaining new customers, increasing their product reach.


oh, plus it'll play movies

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The answer is how much of that data do you need at a particular instant? Remember you only have 512 MB of RAM to work with (plus some hard drive cache for less critical items...) So if you fill the entire disc you are talking about having an extremely large world. It doesn't really affect how much data/detail you can have on the screen at one time. And uncompressed massive textures are a bad idea just from how badly they will eat up your video cards memory bandwith and reduce the amount of detail you have on the rest of the screen. 25 GB will be massive overkill even at the end of the PS3s lifecycle. The only game I give a chance to fill a disc in the next 3 years is that music karaoke game they showed at the press conference with HD music videos. If you do all the music with HD videos to go along with it, that would get huge pretty quick.


This is why I think the PS3 had to have a hard drive, forget filling the entire disk, the just the normal games size for the BD drive took too long to load. So Sony knew they needed to be able to cache files. Of course the desire to sell online media to everyone could also have been the driving factor.

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Third party titles that are designed for multiple platforms (which includes nearly all of them) will NOT make use of the extra capacity provided by blu-ray. Xbox and PS2 history would indicate that third party titles are designed for the weaker system (in my example the PS2) and are ported to the 'more advanced one' with few if any major changes.


So you're not going to see a game like GTA having say one city on the 360 and 2-3 on the PS3. Content is expensive to make...games are getting shorter as well.


I need to find an article I was reading a few months ago. Their research indicated that few games of the Xbox/PS2 generation used the full capacity of DVD's let alone needing something like blu-ray...

RAM size is a big limit factor. People that suggest huge size uncompressed textures usually forget about this.


Then you add advanced techniques like speedtree and advanced compression. To me it's similar to what normal (and other mapping techniques) mapping does, where you can have better looking models without a huge increase in polygons.


Then you add Oblivion, a huge world, incredibly detailed, with all recorded dialog, with hundreds objects that are only there to give life to the world, yet uses less than 5GB of space. And let's not forget GTA4, a game that Sony fans were saying was going to use a full blu-ray disc and yet, it'll be multiplatform from day one.


On the topic of longer games, let's not forget that longer games require more time to develop. Then next-gen games are already taking longer than before and costing more than before. There's also the possibility of releasing a game and adding downloadable content later! All this points to games that are not longer than before, if not shorter!


I think the result is that only a percentage of games will need more than 9GB. I think only games that have tons of pre-rendered cutscenes, like Final Fantasy. I don't see games like Halo and MGS that use the game engine for cutscenes to need more than 9GB.


So the problem I have with blu-ray, is paying a premium for bleeding edge technology that's not mature, that I might need in 2-3 years time, and it's being released in the middle of a format war! I'd be willing to live with whatever percentage of games that would be multi-disc, if the console was going to cost $200-150 less. And I'd guess that percentage would be lower than 5-10%.