Ben-DutkaMany people have questioned the need for Blu-Ray in the PS3, but clearly, it's not only essential, it probably won't be enough for the future.
In an interview with ThreeSpeech , Sony's worldwide studios chief Phil Harrison revealed that several PS3 launch titles are already nearing the maximum Blu-Ray storage capacity of 25GB. This statement was prompted by concerns that Sony chose the Blu-Ray format to push its new media, which will be in direct competition with Microsoft's HD-DVD.
"Already, at our launch titles, we're getting up close to the 25GB limit that we have on our Blu-Ray discs this year," said Harrison. "Next year we'll raise that to 50GB, and I'd expect that we'll be getting close to that in the fairly near future as well."
It's been common knowledge for quite some time that PCs and the Xbox 360 have been jamming large next-gen titles onto DVD, but Harrison insists PS3 games require much more storage space. "DVD is not sufficient capacity to power the kind of data consumption, or to feed the data consumption needs of Cell and RSX," he elaborated. "It's got nothing to do with movies. Just purely as a gameplay device, we need Blu-Ray to supply the kind of data that PS3 games use."
Of course, the first question is how much of that extra space will be utilized by actual gameplay. Harrison had a reply to this as well. The following is a portion of the interview where he explains just how necessary extra storage space really is when it comes to the world of video games.
"It's not just, as you say, about movies — it's about 7.1 audio, it's about animation, it's about high resolution textures. If you have a graphics chip capable of displaying the textures in a high enough resolution, the designers would want to exploit that benefit creatively.
Don't take my word from it — there was a great quote from a guy from EA who said that whenever there's a new disc format, you always struggle to think how developers will fill it, but they always do. I suppose that game development is like gas, it expands to fill the available space. Once you have that technical capability, the creative desire to exploit it follows very quickly thereafter."
