Scoobes said:
Not neccessarily. Most PS3 games are already multiplat and manage to fit on the 6.8Gb of a 360 DVD. With extra compression, slightly lower resolution art due to the small screen and remembering that the cost of ROM memory (not read/write flash) is actually quite cheap, especially for Sony who mass produce, then ports are actually relatively cheap and easy. |
Games released to the XBox 360 already are taking full advantage of compression, and I doubt significant gains could be made without adding noticeable graphical artefacts in the game; and you can downgrade the graphical assets to save space, but to get significant gains you would start to notice the quality reduction. While we could argue about the specifics, at some point the problems introduced from reducing the data-footprint of a game would undermine the entire point of producing a graphically impressive system.
With that said, memory is getting inexpensive but it isn't that cheap ... I could be wrong but I suspect that, while 4GB and 8GB game cards may be possible from launch, I doubt that the game cards that have enough capacity to do a straight port of a HD console game would be inexpensive enough to sell a game for the standard game prices without hurting the developer's margins on these games. This might not prevent Sony from porting first party games, because the margins of first part games are better (because of licensing fees) and they can justify any reduced revenue as platform building, but third party publishers are probably not as willing to cut into their margins or sell games for higher fees.
Obviously, this doesn't mean that these games won't eventually find their way to the NGP; but I see it as being something that will (probably) not be that common until memory prices are reduced further.
