That could be the case, but I would hope that it wouldn't have happened with exclusive games. I highly doubt that Konami would take lightly the decision to have mandatory installs on MGS4.

The seek times issue is not really clarified as far as I've seen, so I tend to lean on that explanation as more likely (in the absence of more concrete data).

I don't understand how any legacy method of putting data on a disc could possibly affect the performance of a drive that reads the data at a constant speed - who cares where the data is positioned...what am I missing?

I love BD and I will give my support for the best HD media avalible. Nothing compares!

I'm just going to analyse the data we have here, and I'm going to try putting my thoughts across as clearly as possible.

Regarding raw data loading speeds (throughput), the PS3 has two advantages over the 360: predictability and faster loading at some places in the disc. The 360 has one advantage which is that it can load data faster than Blu-Ray's speed limit, on a certain section of the disc.

This means that if there's some very critical data which has to be loaded quickly lots of times, 360 developers can put it on that section of the disc which makes for an advantage over the PS3. If this data starts getting too big, this advantage is lost. PS3 developers on the other hand may need to to put this crucial data in the hard drive if Blu-Ray's speed is too slow.

If there's no such crucial piece of data and Blu-Ray's speeds are enough, the advantage is on the PS3's side since data is loaded at the same speed throughout the drive, no slower sections unlike the 360's case.

From an optimization point of view, the PS3 is easier to optimize in terms of raw data loading. There's nothing to optimize as the drive has a constant speed limit across the disc... The only difficulty is that games have to be engineered to not require speeds higher than that, unless the HDD is used.

Regarding seek times, I haven't seen good enough information to go on, so I won't comment on that.

Wasn't MGS4 released on a DL Blu-ray disc? I read it was 33gigs?? There wasn't anything about DL Blu-ray discs average read times in MikeB's source...er, himself. Maybe in that particular instance Konami was forced to have mandatory installs because of the slower read times?

Then again it doesn't explain, Bioshock, GTA IV, Oblivion - DEVIL MAY CRY 4 (25 minute install) etc.

What all of you seem to forget is that early next year all over the air TV broadcast will be HD mandatory, and that many households in the US own HDTVs, so if they recieve HD signals and watch HD shows and movies why would they buy the media that looks worse than what they're getting from TV channels aka DVD? I find the BD transition a natural one after the mandatory HD TV signals...

TV will be digital-only, not HD mandatory, but I agree that Blu-ray wil naturally take over.

According to MikeB Blu-Ray loads at 9 MB/s... In 25 minutes you can load more than 13 GB at that speed. Is DMC4's install that big?

Regarding MGS4 I think you're right, it is a dual layer disc according to the PR. No idea about loading speeds on those, wouldn't be surprised if Sony didn't disclose the data...

^ No it's only 5GB!! But I think that has more to do with the 5400rpm hard drive.

Err no way the hard drive is the bottleneck when copying data from optical media... Unless they used fantastically lousy hard drives that is.