Blu-ray always for PS3

[MikeB]

@ Borkachev

The fact is that BluRay was shoehorned into the PS3 to bolster the format, and not for the PS3's (or the consumer's) benefit.

Facts require hard evidence, else it's just speculation or a personal opinion. Can you provide this?

Consumers can surely benefit from the inclusion of a Blu-Ray drive, for instance the discs are pretty much scratch resistant, allows the user to playback high definition Blu-Ray movie format movies as well and enables game designers to make fewer sacrifices while designing new games.

It's true that we're now pushing the limits of DVD for gaming, but at worst that means swapping disks like we did in the PS1 days.

I will go into some more depth with regard to this one, because I think it's a common misconception.

First of game designers have multiple reasons to keep the amount of discs to a minimum, one is additional cost but not only with regard to the media itself, game design gets more complicated when your game spans multiple discs.

People often cite Blue Dragon as the first XBox 360 game to span multiple discs (3 of them). But please note Blue Dragon is a very Linear RPG/adventure, basically the simplest kind of game to span on multiple discs as developers may decide not to re-use game assets from earlier parts of the game, like textures and sounds (enemies, surroundings such as vegetation, etc), for other types of games like platformers, racing games, 3D shooters, etc this is usually a far more desirable approach. But even in a very Linear game you may require a user to come back to previously visited locations to finish a task (like in for example God of War or many traditional adventure games). If this would mean yet another disc swap, I think many developers will just make gaming sacrifices to work around the need for this disc swapping or maybe multiply data on the other discs (and thus the space available on 6 dual layer DVDs no longer equals the amount of data which is possible to store on a single Blu-Ray disc).

There's been no evidence whatsoever that using DVD somehow limits what can be done with hi-def games, considering the 360 has kept up with the PS3 step-for-step in technical abilities.

For the short run so far, the XBox 360 can keep up. Epic games like God of War take up to 3 years to develop. Second generation PS3 games like Ratchet and Clank Future (a platformer!) seem to benefit a lot already from the additional storage space.

And while I'm sure I'll appreciate having a BluRay drive in the PS3 in a few years, I would rather have paid $350 for the PS3 today and bought a $50 BluRay player in a few years when it's actually worth it.

The PS3 will still be around in a few years and Blu-Ray technology will then be cheaper than would otherwise have been the case if the PS3 didn't launch with a Blu-Ray drive. An external Blu-Ray drive is far less elegant and game designers will take into account the huge PS3 userbase which doesn't own one, just like XBox 360 game designers take into account the lack of a harddrive for a big part of the current XBox 360 userbase.