About how much, on average, does a new PS3 BD game disc hold?  Are they maxing out the 50GB capacity yet?  MSFT still isn't maxing out DVD-9 discs (Fallout 3 is 6.52 GB!)  Anyone?

DUAL LAYER BLU-RAY Holds 50gb

From what I know Mgs4 filled the entire 50gb Blu-Ray.

Hope I helped.

Blu Rays hold around 50GBs (slightly less when formatted) or about 7 times what a DVD holds.

MS doesn't max out disks and end up on 2-3 disks because they compress the audio heavily and use lower res textures. In many cases the PS3 does this as well on multi plat games since it saves money not having two sets of textures, which is part of why I hate the multiplat system.  Often games are lowered to the lowest common denominator to cut costs.

As an example the audio track for a PS3 only game like Heavenly Sword is about 10-15GBs of uncompressed audio and music. That doesn't matter much to a lot of people, but if you have really good speakers and a reciever+sub you can REALLY tell the difference especially in epic battle type scenes. It really sounds like someone is literally fighting behind you, its great.

Also textures are compressed in almost all cases. This is because a slight increase in resolution means a HUGE increase in space (going from 720p to 1080p requires almost 4 times the disk space, ditto with increasing the detail even at the same resolution).

Microsoft compounds this by charging HUGE penalties for using more then one disk. You can hear many developers complain about that if you look through what they say about 360 development. The 360 gets around some of the lower textures by smoothing, using fading in the distance and upscaling, but again, there is a decided difference between games like MGS4 with higher resolution textures and even the best of the 1 disk 360 games.

Not all games use the 50 GBs Blu Rays have, but many use a lot of it especially big budget PS3 only games. For a frank discussion of what the disk space means look at interviews from ID about Rage and what they had to do in order to get the game on two disks much less one.

Again, like the audio, it might not matter if you have a small TV, but if you have a large 1080p TV it makes a pretty big difference having Blu Ray textures in terms of detail especially in the environments.

Developers, developing for DVD based games have to be concious of the limitations that they are working with during the development of the game , lower quality textures here , compressed music there and a little bit of compression everywhere Walah you have a 6.8gb HD game.

it also relates to limiting content. For example look at a lot of high end MMOs these days. They have 20-30GB sizes minimum on your hard drive, that's 4 DVDs. Having to keep things down under 7GBs limits the scope of the world pretty severely especially in large scale games.

Thanks for that info. Yeah, I knew that Kojima said he needed 2 BDs!!! Anyway, I support full DL titles to overcome this problem.