@ CapAmerica
Some more food for thought:
Kojima Productions:
"GP: We recently spoke with Sony's Phil Harrison, who told us that he thinks PS3 games will soon use 50 GB. Do you agree with that prediction?
Kojima: Yes, I do. It's high-def, and just to make it high-def, the data requirements are huge.
Back in the days when I was working on 8-bit, 1 MB ROMs came out and I thought, "wow, great!" But it wasn't enough. When the CD-ROM came out, we thought we had so much space. But when we started to add sound, there was a lack of storage already. Even Blu-ray, I don't even feel that it expanded data so much. With cinematic, the space fills up right away. You may hear Blu-ray is huge, gigantic, 20 GB or so, but that's not really that big to us. One basic [gameplay] frame with HD and 5.1 takes up so much space that the capacity will become too small in no time. If we maintain the same level of graphics and sound as the PS2, then Blu-ray is spacious. But that's not the case.
Evolution Studios regarding Motorstorm:
" When asked how much space the game takes up on a Blu-Ray Disc, the developer replied: "We use most of it, about 18GB if I remember correctly (and everything on the disk is actualy compressed at a 2:1 ratio too as the CELL is so powerful, that it can decompress the data faster than it can read it." The team also reiterated how working on the PS2's World Rally Championship gave the team the "pedigree in racing games" and noted that with each release, the graphics and gameplay bumped up another level. We can expect the same with future games from Evolution Studios on the PS3."
Another interview:
"We also use most of the Blu-Ray disk (thank god its not a DVD!). We are confident however that we can still sqeeze a great deal more out of the PS3 and as we found by making World Rally Championship for PS2 every yeat for 5 years, doubling the visual through put is not unusual on EVERY ITTERATION!) - yes, it even amazes us!"
Phase5 regarding Lair:
"IGN: What advantage does Blu-ray afford you now? Everyone talks about how great the extra storage space is but are you actually using it for Lair?
Eggebrecht: The single level at TGS alone takes up 4 Gigabytes of data. We are using every ounce of that due to streaming of our textures. Sure you could chop them all down to tiny sizes and we would fit, but then again, it would not be the same game. In addition to all the textures and geometry, we also do have video on the disc, and all of that is in native 1080p resolution. Thanks to Blu-Ray we don't need to worry about that and can still fit the whole game on a single disk."