With DL DVD being maxed out for the last 2-3 years in the PC market, then it's not suprising at all. After all space is needed for better visuals and there is only so much you can compress before quality truly suffers...

This should be the way future PS3 games will separate themselves from the competition (quanitity and visuals, not necessarily quality)

Optimizing for space is not important for console games distributed in optical media, since there's no advantage in using less space on the Blu-Ray discs per se. There might be some related advantages such as faster loading times, but that's entirely dependent on what the space is being used for.

For example, if most of the space is being used for uncompressed audio, there's no disadvantage in using it as long as the drive is fast enough to read it while the engine runs. If they don't need the space for much else, using uncompressed audio is then practically a no-brainer.

The stupid part in all of this is the bragging about using 50 GB. There's no big deal about it, yet fanboys do react as if it meant Blu-Ray is really necessary for making current-gen games. It's the same thing with MGS4, in which case two contradictory reports have come out from Konami:

1- They're using uncompressed audio

2- They say Blu-Ray is a constraint in making the game

If 2 was indeed true, they'd use some lossless audio compression algorithm, since the Cell is great at decompressing data. It would provide them with more space for the rest of the game's data, while maintaing audio quality unchanged (not that many people have the sound systems or the ears to notice when audio is compressed with a proper bitrate).

The bottom line: This kind of news is almost irrelevant, and can be safely ignored as the information content in them is practically zero.

Most anticipated game for me this year. Really anxious for it to release.

wtf,R2 is about 50g,just wow

I think the only reason the size of games is mentioned is because Sony is still fighting a perception battle against the idea that DVD is enough space for 'anything' gaming related this generation.

The game looks to become a great technical showpiece title for the PS3, highlighting the benefits of Blu-Ray and the Cell processor. The feature list sounds awesome as well.

Ratchet loads faster than Resistance: Fall of Man despite the much upped graphics also due to texture streaming being introduced for their second game, Resistance had to load all the graphics data into memory in one go per level, for Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction due to texture streaming sports an additional 140 MB of graphics data per level. A comment from Game Informer says Insomniac already moved the bulk of their game engine on the the Cell's SPUs, this should enable enormous gains in performance like we already saw for Ratchet (solid 60 FPS, this while sporting a lot of additional activity, like background spacecraft traffic and loads of high quality badguys and bullets flying around).

I just remembered this:

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/08/15/heavenly-sword-packed-with-10-gb-of-sound-data/

"Heavenly Sword packed with 10 GB of sound data"

Now keep in mind how short Heavenly Sword was, and you can start seeing just how much space uncompressed audio takes up.

i see some sarcasm in ur statement. correct?

I don't think 360 fanboys really believe this, they say they do, but I think the loudmouths on the internet know the benefits due to informative replies to their cries or developer comments. (Lossless 7.1 audio, higher quality and/or more diverse graphics, localizations, room for additional gameplay content, no disc scratching, less noisy drive, (on average higher reading speed) constant streaming speed, etc).

The fact is the 360 doesn't come with a Blu-Ray drive and maybe never will, so like some Dreamcast fanboys claiming a DVD drive for the PS2 was too costly and pretty much useless 360 fanboys do the same. Pretty much expected taking into account historical data.

 "That sizable number includes approximately three and a half hours of music, sound effects and 4,500 lines of dialog. "There's an hour and a half's worth of cut scenes in eleven languages," said SCEE's Garry Taylor."