Games are not short because of a lack of space, they are short to get more money out of a smaller investment.

So, the PC version of Gears must have been shipped on multiple disks because it has more content (the Brumak battle) than the 360 version had.  At least according to your logic.

I've yet to see any benefit of putting any game on a blu-ray compared to a dvd.

If it needs to then Im not going to cry if Gears2 is on 2x dvd's. I expect its still cheaper to burn a game on 2x dvd's than 1 Blu Ray?

I certainly dont really mind replacing a disc once in a 20 hour game.

Splitting a game across multiple disks is more than just figuring out where you want to break the action up. You essentially have three copies of the code, but each copy is a little different. You need to figure out what assets need to be on witch disk. Debugging and deploying each build becomes more work. The game design itself might be altered to keep from having to swap disks so often.

It’s not a transparent decision.

That still doesn't equal majore development time. You forget that this was a common thing in RPGs once, so it was simply a matter of applying that to these games. It does take work, but you haven't proven it takes so much work and money that it would be better to go with blu-ray.

And you still haven't answered my question about what had to be cut because of splitting discs. Or, properly, you haven't provided any guesses, sinct you can't really know.

I have, but I will guess again (and yes, it's just a guess)

In Ratchet and Clank (and other games), you jump into your ship, and pick any planet to fly too. If 1/3 of the game was in 3 disks, you would then have to swap each time you flew to a planet on the disk that’s not in your system. I assume a game that was split up on more disks wouldn’t have this game design. They would find a different way.

Game designers are very smart and creative people. You give them all the assets they have to work with and they tend to use them to their advantage. If you listed all the assets of a system, and everything was equal, other than the delivery system was 50 gig and not 9 gig, I think it would affect their creative ideas.

Let’s excaudate the issue. What if they only had as many 3.5 inch floppy’s as they wanted to use instead of a DVD to deliver a graphical RPG. Do you think they would have delivered Mass Effect on floppies? Do you think only having floppy’s would have changed what they delivered?

Of course it would. That’s an extreme, but it’s the same issue, just magnified.

Actually, some multi-disc games in the PS1 years did split regions by disc. Legend of Dragoon is one of them.

And no, stating they don't need blu-ray is not on the level of stating we should stick with floppy discs. That argument is outright bullshit.

It's the same argument, just to the extreme (aside from disk read speeds). How about this. Let's say the 360 only had a CD drive in it. Do you think Mass Effect would have been the same game if designed to fit on CD's?

I don't, and that's the exact same argument.

But it doesn't have CDs. So it's still not valid. It's still just assuming that they should either accept blu-ray or they might as well downgrade the format they already have. Not valid.

They have DVD9 on the system, so that it what you have to discuss. And so far, all you've done is make wild guesses about what limitations multiple discs would impose, without actaully proving any of them.