Blu-ray Drive Speed More Relevant to Games Than Capacity
Couple of you wrote asking what I thought of the recent announcement by Insomniac that their PS3 title Resistance: Fall of Man would use 22 GB of a Blu-ray disc's capacity. I also had someone point me to a recent CNET interview with Kaz Hirai in which he said the following:
Given the differences in pricing, which is fairly significant between Microsoft's Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, are there any chances of a PlayStation 3 down the line that doesn't have Blu-ray built in?
Hirai: The PlayStation 3 uses the Blu-ray as its storage medium for both games and for movies as well. We wanted to take advantage of the storage capacity that Blu-ray offers in terms of motion pictures and other content, but most importantly, for games as well. Our decision to include the Blu-ray player from day one in all of our PlayStation 3s was the right decision and, quite honestly, the only decision we can make.
Look at the massive amounts of data that's required to provide a truly immersive gaming experience in true HD. If you only have a DVD ROM drive, which can only go up to about 9GB or so, you're going to end up with a game that's going to have two or possibly even three discs. And then you're going to have to ask consumers to swap discs out or cache all the game onto the hard drive which I think is an inconvenience--not to mention the fact that you're going to fill up a 20GB hard drive very quickly with some of these games. So trying to go without a Blu-ray drive in the PlayStation 3 really is a nonstarter.
I've already written some thoughts about Blu-ray's capacity being irrelevant for games in this generation. In that article I stated that while I believed we'd see games released on larger discs, I didn't believe the content on those discs would directly impact the game itself (versus having "making of" or other random bonus material).
Appears this is the case with Resistance. A recent interview with the developer in the Unofficial Playstation Magazine stated that the 22 GB "game" size was made up of localized content. In other words, instead of having an English version of the game, a French version, a Japanese version, and so on on separate discs, all of that localized content is simply being bundled on one disc. While that makes things a bit easier for the developer, the disc capacity isn't being used in any meaningful way to improve the game. And frankly, I believe time will show (after the game is released and people start poking around the file system) that there isn't any reason the title couldn't have shipped on a DVD-9.
As to Hirai's quote on next-gen games needing 2-3 discs, the simplest answer I can give is to just look around. There appear to be plenty of next-generation games out today that are doing just fine on one disc... I'm really not sure what game store he's been shopping at. And this holiday when you're able to compare next-gen titles side-by-side on multiple platforms, I suspect you'll quickly find the vast majority are on one disc, and that the game content is identical.
I thought the the poke about "caching the game to the hard drive" was a bit odd as well. At GDC Europe last year Sony mentioned in their presentation that the PS3 Blu-ray drive would have sustained peak transfer rates of 36 MBit/s (4.5 MB/s) at 1x speed. Since then it appears that the drive has been upgraded to a 2x drive, which would enable transfer rates of 9 MB/s. Assuming a full 50 GB Blu-ray disc, at this speed you'd need just over 90 minutes to read the entire disc through memory. Of course, you can't fit all of that data into system memory at the same time, so you'll either be streaming a great deal (hard even with faster optical drives) and/or caching data to the hard drive. There's a reason the PS3 is so expensive - once Sony committed to Blu-ray as a corporate strategy, they were also forced to bundle the hard drive in every box to help mitigate slow disc data transfer rates. PS3 games need that hard drive to load in any reasonable time - just look at the PSP for an example of the effects of a slow optical drive on game loading times.
One last thing to think about. Put yourself in the shoes of a game developer faced with loading game assets into memory from a slow optical drive. You're going to have to be clever and find ways to try and make sure the data is laid out on the disc where it's most quickly accessible. You might do things like burn chunks of data to the disc in multiple locations to cut down on seek times, or duplicate assets such as level textures in each level's package so they can be read serially on level load. In other words, you might start storing data inefficiently and duplicatively to better conform to the drive's poor speed characteristics. It's not too hard to see how a game could quickly balloon in size while not adding any actual value or gameplay.