Alright, so according to bungie (the horse's mouth i guess) the release to amazong was a mistake by Microsoft and that Halo 3 right now is contained on a single disk... you can read up on it at the bungie weekly update at:

www.bungie.net

Because Japan hates the Xbox.  In the Americas, the 360 got off to a slow start because of supply issues.  On the launch-aligned Americas chart, you can see where supply increased and the 360 starts to diverge from the PS3.  Divergence is a much more desirable outcome than leveling off, which is what the PS3 is doing.  It means that there is stable demand for the 360, and decreasing demand for the PS3.  It means that, after the PS3 launch hype died down, the lead that the 360 built up by launching a year earlier is increasing every day with respect to the PS3.  That's why people are saying that Sony is in a pickle.

I'm not saying they're doomed, I'm saying they're not where they want to be and it will be difficult to get there.  The first two years are the most important.  You're not necessarily doomed if you're in third place, but it's certainly worse than being ahead.

I think that Sony is in trouble because historically, no console has survived the problems they're having. I'm not saying they're necessarily doomed, but that's certainly looking like a real possibility...

Regardless on whether this (or other) games are on two discs you have to realize that Microsoft didn't have the option to release the XBox with a higher density drive. Microsoft released the XBox 360 in 2005 at a time when Sony and Toshiba were both debating whether to merge the two formats into one format; this meant that there was no standard format to choose because both of the formats standards could potentially change. It would have been impractical for Microsoft to use a non-standard Blue Laser disc based format because no manufacturers where mass producing blue laser diodes because there were no products that used them; even if you assume that this was not the case the cost for including a HD drive in the XBox 360 would have probably driven the price to $800 or higher upon release.

Basically, complaining that Microsoft should have used HD-DVD or Blu-Ray for the XBox 360 is very similar to complaining that Sony should have used a 65nm process to produce a far more powerful PS3 at launch.

That's right everyone, even though stand-alone Blu-Ray players cost $600 and up still, it only adds $50 to the price of the PS3! All those people selling Blu-Ray players are just ripping everyone off with $550 in profit for each one, and purposely allowing HD-DVD to sell more stand-alone players sitting at the $300 price point.

Maybe people don't want to pay an extra $200 just to avoid swapping discs? And if you don't have an HDTV or don't watch movies on discs then that's really what you'd be doing.

PS: If you look at the hardware chart a little more carefully, you'd see that the PS3 used to be ahead of the 360 launch-aligned a month or so ago thanks to stronger sales in Japan and the massively-stocked Europe launch, but weekly sales are so bad now that it's fallen back down and is now selling at half the rate as the 360 was a year ago. (43k a week worldwide vs 80k a week worldwide)

Also interesting to note is that the 360 is selling at about the same weekly rate now as it did a year ago. If the same hold true for future years for both it and the PS3, then in 5 years the 360 will be sitting at about 50M consoles with the PS3 at about 35M. And the Wii would be somewhere upwards of 80M at the rate it's going.

Align launches to make comparisons all you want but the fact of the matter is, right now the PS3 is behind and every week it falls further behind. Even when you align launches the PS3 is falling behind where the 360 was a year ago and only selling at half that pace week by week.

The problem with the PS3 vs. 360, in terms of sales is this:

The Playstation 2 sold 120 million units, worldwide, and counting.

The Xbox sold 25 million units, worldwide, and is now dead in the water.

The PS3 in no way, shape or form, will match it's predicessor, whereas the X360 will totally whomp it's predicessor in every way.

Also, I would question where the PS3 will be at this Christmas. Can it move 3m+ systems in Nov/Dec like the 360 did?

Coming up with stuff like "the PS3 is selling at the same rate as the 360 aligning lauches" totally throws away the past 5 years of Xbox and PS2 sales, and 10 years of sales history with Sony.

If you want to pay $600 for Blu-Ray, thats fine. When the next-gen launches, HVD will probably already replace Blu-Ray, and we'll have Xbox 720 with a 3.2tb storage solution vs. a still-aging PS3 with a 50gb storage solution.

There was no way the 360 could of had a next-gen optical format when it launched. HD-DVD was nowhere near done (launched about 8 months after launch, 10 months after production of the 360). MS had nothing to do with HD-DVD, aside from approve of it vs. Blu-Ray. Sony had to put it in to make the format win, and promote the Blu-Ray, and try to justify the insane price of the PS3.

You can have your $600 PS3. I don't want it. I'm more than happy with the idea of disk-swapping games like Halo3 and Blue Dragon, rather than 1-disk games like Folklore and Uncharted.

Why are you all still arguing about this? It's been debunked by bungie themselves today. There are no 2 game discs. It's an executable disc. Cease the ignorance and lock the thread. Stupidity could become contagious.

http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=topnews&cid=12531

The “Game Disc 2” shown in the art actually refers to an interactive Bonus Content disc. It’s an Xbox “executable” (think of it like a menu-driven disc, similar to the Official Xbox Magazine cover disc) and internally, has always been referred to as “Game Disc 2” because it has to go through the same certification process as Halo 3 itself. That was somehow communicated to MS retail marketing verbatim. Hence the error. No big deal.

it's not a big deal, it's just everybody is scared one of them may get chewed up by the 360... :)

I'd rather have a couple multidisc games, then spend $200 more so I can have them all on one. It's a pointless waste of money.

Of course, I didn't buy my PS3 for the disc space anyway...

That said, I'm psyched Halo 3 is on two discs. Hopefully this means it will be an expansive, huge game.

Edit: Nevermind....looks like it's still a one disc game.

@ D-FENS

You are talking about a comment made by an Oblivion developer, the company stated his comments were pulled out of context and the implications were being exaggerated.

The PS3's Blu-Ray drive isn't really slow at reading data at all, on average it's actually faster than the XBox 360 drive can read dual-layer DVDs and I think most future top ranking XBox 360 games will come supplied on dual-layer DVDs as we are already starting to see multi-disc games appear for the XBox 360.

Sustained reading speed can come in handy for developers, as they can easily predict how much data can be streamed from the disc, this is not the case for DVD for which the reading speed is heavily dependent on the location of the disc being read. Also every PS3 has a harddrive for developers to take advantage of to temporary cache large amounts of data to the PS3's harddrive.

Oblivion loads much faster on the PS3, despite the higher quality textures. Apart from the higher quality textures, they added additional content.

Have a look at this PS3 review:
http://www.gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?id=3450