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ArnoldRimmer on 09 October 2013
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J_Allard said:

There's nothing "nonsense" about it.

The BR drive is slow. This is common knowledge. The mandatory installs are needed to improve what would otherwise be terrible load times. This is also common knowledge. What we saw at the start of the generation were developers loading up the BR discs with unneeded, redundant data so that the actual content you'd be needing to accessing could be more quickly accessed. Then they started just making us install content on the HDD. Some games make it optional, some games require it. Yeah, there are good reasons to have installations. Like reduced loading times, and less use of your BR drive. But they exist because the BR drive is slow. That's why so many are mandatory on PS3 and optional on 360. On 360 they are more of a compromise for the size of the DVD format.

It's a mistake Sony made which will be fixed by a faster BR drive.

Reading your previous posting again, I just realized that it was ambiguous and I probably just misinterpreted it, as I thought you claimed that Sony would forbid mandatory installs next generation, which of course really would be utter "nonsense" as I'm sure you'll admit. So I guess I need to at least partially apologize.

What you're saying about the BD drive being slow is absolutely correct of course, but I still believe you're wrong about this being the reason for mandatory installs. As I said, there are very good reasons for mandatory installs. PC games have been using mandatory installs for ages, despite lacking slow BluRay drives. Microsoft was forced to allow them mid-generation, despite originally introducing a "no mandatory installs"-policy. And despite the "slow BD drive" issue probably being largely resolved next generation, Sony is not changing their policy on mandatory installs - instead, Microsoft is adopting it.

So there are very good reasons to allow mandatory installs. Most games can perfectly live without them (actually, I cannot remember that even a single of my PS3 games required them), but for some types of games it's extremely hard, if not impossible, to develop the game the way you want to without making use of mandatory installs.

So the big question is not: Why should a video game console manufacturer allow mandatory installations?

Instead, the obvious question is: Why should a video game console manufacturer forbid video game developers to use mandatory installs if the game developer thinks that it would improve the experience?

The answer to that question is simple: Until last/current generation, video game consoles simply didn't have the storage space. They were usually using memory cards with almost no storage space, so mandatory installs were technically impossible.

But when the PS3 came out and absolutely all models were equipped with at least several gigabytes of storage space, there was just no reason to forbid game developers to use mandatory installs if they considered them useful.

The situation was just a little different on the 360. Microsoft decided to release a budget version of the 360 without harddisk, and thus decided to forbid mandatory installs to not confuse and anger Arcade owners. You can even find interviews with prominent game developers from several years ago (I think they were from Rockstar, if I remember correctly) where they said that Microsoft's biggest mistake with the 360 was the decision to sell a budget version without harddisk, because that decision meant that game developers could not make use of mandatory installs.