L.A. Noire was once a six-disc game on Xbox 360

[Alby_da_Wolf]

Mr Puggsly said:

Alby_da_Wolf said:

Disc swapping was annoying on PC too, my favourite platform, and it had a peak during the transition from CD to DVD, when DVD was still expensive and not present in the majority of PCs yet, so SW houses released their biggest (as size, not necessarily success) games on multiple CDs, with no complete HDD install option when average HDD space was less than 40GB, and often only the most successful received a DVD version immediately or later, when a budget edition was released (and often only the most successful received total install - no CD patches).

If PS3 has an advantage, it's pointless to deny it, and during the transition from DVD to BD it's destined to be most evident. And if Sony paid a lot for it, initially selling PS3 at a loss, good for its users.

Immediately after PS3 situation comes the PC, currently, as HDD size grew enough in the last 10 years to allow complete installs even of the biggest games, so we PC users, not having Sony partially funding a BDD adoption for us, can wait for prices to drop and install from DVDs still avoiding disc swaps after the initial installation effort.

Third comes Wii that being SD needs less space and it's still fine with just one DVD per game.

And on this issue last comes XB360, sorry.

Multi disc PC games wasn't that big of an issue. Unless its a lot of discs. For example, I own the GOTY edition of UT2004 on CD-Roms. Its 7 discs and installing everything is a huge pain in the ass.

I remember on the PS1 I used to play a FMV game called Psychic Detective. It was 3 discs and it only took 45 minutes to beat. Worst of all you didn't just change discs as you progressed, you actually changed them back and forth every few minutes!

Those are some worst case scenarios in disc swapping. Now lets quit pretending swapping a disc after hours and hours of playing is a big deal.

Nobody is denying PS3 has the advantage of being able to hold significantly more storage on a single disc. But for this gen it hasn't proven to be essential. Spin it anyway you want but it significantly hurt the Playstation brand more than it helped.

You have good points too, when the discs are a few and to be swapped rarely, it isn't a terrible issue (but for example in Lands of Lore III, on PC, once all the worlds were unlocked, traveling for quests was a pain in the arse with 4 CDs to swap quite often and no complete install to HDD option), I don't deny it. But about PS3 and BD, let's not mix things up: Sony initially shot itself in the foot, killing its HW profits for years, but users had a bigger benefit from it just because Sony accepted to pay the bill selling PS3 at a loss to push it and BD. I was referring to users benefit, not Sony one, that is quite arguable as we don't really know how many losses it was ready to suffer to make it win the format war (although it's obvious the losses were a lot higher than its best case scenario). Another thing to not forget about optical disc space usefulness: if I'm not wrong, MS charges extra royalties for games on more than 2 discs, so devs make everything possible to avoid them exceed that space. Anyway, about this issue, it's just natural that extra disc space available becomes more useful as time goes by, and that initially it's less important, this has been good for MS, allowing it to not suffer because of it during XB360 first years. Finally, as I wrote other times, even if I don't trust MS, it's a good thing that it and Ninty soundly bashed Sony when it was becomig too arrogant, this benefitted competitors, SW houses and users, and I think Sony too, in the long term. Just as it's good that Ninty doesn't bury anymore MS and Sony in this part of the current gen, balance is good to cater for as many different gamer tastes as possible.