Sony's in a 'bag of hurt' because of Blu-ray

[SvennoJ]

DM235 said:

nanarchy said:

 

yep, I think we missed a huge opportunity this gen to completely ditch optical disks, perhaps if the gen was a year later. when you don't have to optimise a card for writing the cost of the card significantly reduces and in bulk SD would be a viable medium and enable far better future proofing for game sizes and speed requirements. BR cost sony a lot, and not just currently, they wrote some huge cheques to get other movie studio's to switch sides to BR and spent a lot on hardware in ps3 and elsewhere to try to push the format.

We are not there yet.  A 25 GB Blu-ray disc (with full-color on disc printing), a case with color insert and shrink wrap costs less than $3/disc in bulk.

http://www.discmakers.com/products/bluray.asp

A 32GB microSD card costs about $8/card in bulk.

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Free-Shipping-Fast-Access-TF-Card-Wholesale-Bulk-Price-Micro-sd-Cards-32GB-64GB-Memory-Card/1856581944.html

If anything, publishers would prefer to go to an all-digital future, but the intranet infrastructure isn't there yet globally.

Both PS4 and XB1 are positioned to be your multi media device, so the optical drive is in there anyway. No point in adding an extra SD card reader and raising the prices for games by $10 just to cover the higher production cost (and probably time? Sounds like it would take longer to make a pre loaded SD card than to press a disc)

Plus Sony has their own blu-ray pressing factories for movies and games, much cheaper than building a new SD card factory. Blu-ray has had 128GB discs on the market for over 3 years now, but I guess a second disc is cheaper overall if a game eventually needs more than 50GB. Faster drives are also available, 12x CAV blu-ray drive does 54MBs. Yet 6x CAV was deemed fast enough for installs.

Dirt cheap HDD + cheap blu-ray drive + cheap discs = profit