sharky said:
Well, 4 DVD's is approaching 40 GB's..and considering I dont think a Blu ray game has yet to be even released on more than a single layer disc...meaning <23GB of data...
Blu ray is more expensive for a dual layer. I think Heavenly Sword said they almost used dual layer but didn't. All things equal PS3 publishers will try to avoid it because of extra cost right now.
In other words, 4 DVD's is approaching so big it would take two Blu ray's..look at it that way. Or in other words, it's more data than any PS3 game yet as well.
Anyways, I dont see top of the line PC games using that much. Look at World in Conflict, the just released PC RTS game that has superb graphics. I randomly noticed it installs to 9GB. However it is meant for a PC with 2-4GB of RAM, and more raw power than PS3/360 have.
So basically I dont think DVD is a realistic limitation. I will be interested also in what size is the Crysis install, since it has better graphics than any console game anyway.
Also Heavenly Sword is a good example. A 23 GB game that was only 6 hours. More storage doesn't mean much. The real console limitation is 512 MB RAM. That and the fact all the data has to stream from a tiny pipe the optical drives. Because of this, the data has to be heavily compressed anyway, no matter how big of a reservoir it has. It still has to go through that tiny bottleneck from disc to 512MB RAM. |
First off, single-layered BD-Roms hold 25GB of data, not 23. Also, only ~7GB of space is available to 360 developers on a DVD9 due to restrictions from MS (i'm not sure what they are). They do not have access to the full 8.5GB. Assuming that the 4th disc is roughly half full, you'd have 3.5 x 7GB = 24.5GB. 24.5GB is less than 25GB. Even if the total data did surpass the 25GB mark, they could just go dual-layer like you said. Kojima already plans to do this with MGS4.
As far as the expense of Blu-Ray discs, large runs of single-layered BD-Roms came to about 37 cents per disc, compared to ~10 cents per DVD, so a 4 disc DVD game would actually cost publishers more than a Blu-Ray disc game. I'm sure a dual-layered BD-rom wouldn't cost much more than a single layer, as they are already being mass produced for movies like Pirates of the Caribbean, so the cost difference is negligible.
About high end pc games, on the EA store it was recently listed that Crysis would need 16GB of HDD space. However, these specs were quickly taken down and Crytek scame out saying that the specs are not final yet. It could end up being a little bit more or a little bit less, but it's a safe bet that the final number will be roughly 16GB.
Also, Medieval II: Total War shipped on two DVD9s way back in Nov. '06.
To repeat my initial statement, how many discs will 360 games require in another 2 years?
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