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Comments: 170 +-   Future Blu-ray Movies To Come With Playable Game Demos on Friday November 13, @12:23AM

Posted by Soulskill on Friday November 13, @12:23AM
from the confluence-of-media dept.
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Audiofan writes "Enthusiasts have long suggested the PlayStation 3 to their family and friends as one of the better and most affordable Blu-ray players. Lately, prices of Blu-ray players have been coming down, but the PS3 is still one of the better options out there. Sony is taking advantage of this by starting to offer game demos on their Blu-ray offerings. While these demos will only be playable on the PS3, they hope the extra value will help drive sales."
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Submission: Future Blu-ray Titles to Include PlayablGame Demos by Audiofan (719817)
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Future Blu-ray Movies To Come With Playable Game Demos 50 Comments More | Reply /

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  • Great idea! This'll be bigger than UMD Vide... oh...

    Nevermind...

  • This is awesome. Most game demos have to give you enough to wet your appetite for more. Most of the time you can realize the game would suck, but the demo usually has a few redeeming qualities making the 30 minutes that you play the demo rewarding and entertaining.

    So: I'm all for it.

  • I'm so over these stupid shiny plastic discs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by matty619 (630957) on Friday November 13, @02:02AM (#30084182)

    I really hope that bluray is the last of this shiny plastic disc phenomenon. I had a somewhat respectable VHS collection, then amassed a healthy DVD collection, jumped on the HD-DVD bandwagon with the HD player add-on for the 360 before that battle was lost, and now I've got about the same number of bluray discs.

    We've been told time and again, when you buy an album, or a copy of a movie, you don't *own* that copy, you have merely licensed it. So I'm not allowed to make a backup for personal use of the copy of my license, when the new format comes out, I have to buy a new "license" for the IP I have already licensed.... I am sooo ready to simply "license" movies via a Netflix like subscription service....I'll pay $20/month (less than the cost of 2 premium cable TV channels) if I can "rent" any movie I like on the fly. I've already got a 20 Mb/s internet connection, and with DOCSIS 3.0 coming to my area next year, should be fast enough to stream reasonably compressed HD content. No more need to buy and keep track of fragile little discs...or have to re-purchase when the next format comes out 12 years later.

    I'm just over it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by reashlin (1370169)
      Oh I get it, your so sick of moving from format to format, media to media, license to license that your ready to jump ship from Blu-ray to a subscription download service. Good on ya.

      You'd be better off just keeping the old 'players' around and not jumping on every new bandwagon that rolls into town. You can still buy decent combined DVD/VHS players so its won't likely take up too much space on that front. I'm sure you've still got your 360 around and likely a PS3. So I don't see why you have to replace an

    • >>>jumped on the HD-DVD bandwagon

      That's your own dumb fault. If you had been smart (like me ;-) ), you would have patiently waited for the BD and HDDVD war to be over. I learned that early on, when I bought Betamax instead of VHS. Better to wait to see who has won.

       

    • Re:I'm so over these stupid shiny plastic discs (Score:4, Interesting)

      by elrous0 (869638) * on Friday November 13, @09:53AM (#30086734)

      Do you really think it's going to work that way? You think studios are just going to give up the lucrative model they have now just so you can pay a small flat fee for all-you can-eat? No, let me tell you how it would REALLY work if they got rid of those "shiny discs": It would be exactly the same as it is now, with you paying $20-$25 per movie, only now you would only get a downloaded copy which you couldn't then resell or loan to a friend. The end.

      And that is why you should PRAY that those shiny discs stick around.

  • But this might be a little irritating to any blu-ray player manufacturers NOT named Sony.

  • PS3 *CAN* be used as a DVR (Score:5, Informative)

    by 117 (1013655) on Friday November 13, @04:12AM (#30084660)
    From TFA:

    just about the only thing you can't do with a PS3 is use it as a DVR.

    This might be true in the US, but in other regions the PlayTV [wikipedia.org] hardware add-on enables you to do exactly that. PlayTV allows you to watch live free-to-air TV and HDTV through the PS3, and record those programs to the PS3's hard drive. I bought the PlayTV add-on (I'm in the UK) as it was cheaper than buying a standalone DVR for free-to-air broadcasts, and have found it to be easier to use and far more reliable than the standalone alternatives available here

  • That would have been awesome, Futurama blu-Ray with playable Game Demo...but NO! ;-/

    • Oh you crazy consumers...

      You'll get a feature limited demo of our crappy sweatshop game, with ads on all the loading screens(also present in $60 full version and $80 non-resellable-DLC-fuck-you-gamestop edition), on the same disk as the average movie tie in.

      And by god, you'll like it(or we'll blame piracy).

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by tacarat (696339)
        You forgot the trojan that gets installed if your player happens to be a computer.

        • Re:Too easy... (Score:4, Funny)

          by fuzzyfuzzyfungus (1223518) on Friday November 13, @12:44AM (#30083826) Journal
          It isn't a trojan if there is a cryptic reference to it somewhere in our illegibly tiny 55 page EULA...

            • Most people outside of slashdot probably have a vague idea [trojancondoms.com].

              • Re:Too easy... (Score:5, Funny)

                by Idiomatick (976696) on Friday November 13, @01:02AM (#30083910)
                I never understood why a condom brand would want to associate itself with the trojans.

                Buy our brand. When you have sex the girl won't even notice you infiltrating, then once inside all your little soldiers will pop out and reek havok. Then you can tell her, 'Haha, Suprise!'

                • Re:Too easy... (Score:4, Informative)

                  by The Dancing Panda (1321121) on Friday November 13, @01:22AM (#30084024)
                  The greeks did that to the trojans. The trojans had an unbreakable wall. I think that's the idea.

                • The Greeks built the horse. The Trojans were dumb enough to haul it inside the city walls.

                  Paris, prince of Troy, started the whole bloody war when he seduced the already married Helen of Sparta.


                  • Yeah - typical Greek view. He seduced her like she got no say in the matter. More likely she was just tired of being married to some old king who obviously wasn't a very nice person as he was willing to kill his own daughter to please Poseidon. Personally I just attribute the whole affair to Eris, she of the Golden Apple (Hail Eris!) ;)

                    Anyway, we should enjoy our Greek Myth while we can. Hollywood is about to butcher them [imdb.com] yet again.

                    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

                      by Chris Mattern (191822)

                      More likely she was just tired of being married to some old king who obviously wasn't a very nice person as he was willing to kill his own daughter to please Poseidon.

                      That was Agamemnon, not his brother Menelaus. Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra got to show him what she thought of that when he got home from the war.

                  • So you are saying it is "Wear our condom, you are an idiot." How the fuck does that help?

                  • Technically the gods killed the guy who said that they shouldn't trust the horse with snakes, and everyone else was afraid and hurled it in, so you can't really blame them.

                • I never understood why a condom brand would want to associate itself with the trojans.

                  New ad campaign: "Put on a Trojan and you'll get inside her walls"

    • Re:Too easy... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by urIkon (1073202) on Friday November 13, @12:38AM (#30083778)

      I'm amazed you can exhibit such foresight from under that bridge!

      I often scoff at marketing ploys, but game demos are a good thing. As long as this doesn't increase the price of the discs, this is more value for your dollar- it isn't as if you have to play the demo to watch your movie.

      Now, just watch them bundle some highly anticipated game demo exclusively with some crap film- SURPRISE HOME MOVIE SALES HIT OF THE SUMMER!

      • But who's really going to pay the price of a Blu-ray disc to play the game demo, even if they REALLY want to? I mean sure, if its on the same disc as a film you'd buy anyway... but to buy Terrible Parody Movie 9 to play the demo of the ohmygodsweetjesusawesome Halo (or any other highly popular game) game coming out the next spring... no.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Hadlock (143607)

          I think this is more of a case of "hey, we have extra space left over, we can sell that as premium video game advertising space!". Joe developer might not get much per disc to put a demo on a straight to video disc, but how much is EA, Valve, or Bethseda willing to pay to put Metal Gear Solid 5 demo, Grand Turismo 7 demo etc on something as big as Transformers 3 Blu Ray disc? The production studio/director probably sign away marketing rights on their DVD/Blu Ray already, so this is money straight in the dis


          • Personally, this would annoy me. I hate trailers on discs. I (and I assume most people) only buy discs because we'll want to keep the movie and watch it again in time. And when I do, it's very irritating to see trailers for old movies pop up or (with the early Blu-Rays) a feature piece telling me how great Blu-Ray is. I would feel the same way about demos for games.

            On top of this, a producer would be shooting itself in the foot by not making a demo available elsewhere, e.g. for download online. So if it

      • RTFA? Oh, wait, I forgot where I was for a moment. ;)
        Anyways, yes this is almost exactly what they're doing. Bundling an *extremely* highly anticipated game demo with a reasonably successful film. In this case it's the God of War 3 demo bundled with District 9. A movie I want to own and a game I want to try. So as long as it doesn't cost any extra, yes I will be buying this. :)

    • You must be blind as a bat.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Abcd1234 (188840)

        Hardly. Case in point: I refuse to by a huge TV because, frankly, I don't have the room, and I consider it nothing more than conspicuous consumption. So I've settled on a 32" TV... which is, TBH, still huge, but I happen to watch it from a couch that's a good 12-14 feet away (it's on an angle, so the viewing distance varies a bit). And from that distance, at that screen size, SD and HD are indistinguishable simply due to physical limitations in the human eye related to angular resolution.

        So unless I pla

        • I use to think like you, even after we got a HD tv. I looked at it and went "so what? Its just like the old tv." After a few months of using it I then went and looked at someone's old SD tv and I could immediately tell the difference.

          So hey, while ever you don't know the difference, it won't kill you. But the second you do, you won't be able to go back.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by TheRaven64 (641858)
            Oh, I can tell the difference, I just don't care. A lot of what I watch (on a projector, so on about a two metre display) is from iPlayer or streamed from the company I rent DVDs from. This is lower than DVD quality, but it's good enough. If I'm noticing the artefacts then it's probably because the show is too boring to be immersive. Given the choice between this and 1080p then, all other things being equal, I'd take the 1080p version. All other things are not equal though and so I'll take the greater

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by DrXym (126579)
      That "dead on arrival" format is experiencing growth comparable to DVD in its day. And even if it did die for whatever reason so what? Tools like AnyDVD make it fairly straightforward to rip the content to HDD at which point you have a high quality 1080p movie which will be good for years to come.

      • Alas poor Superbit, we hardly knew ye.

      • I'm even surprised dvds became so popular. The thing that drives me nuts about dvds is the damn menus they put at the start. I just want to watch the movie.

        Don't assume, just because that's your preference, that it applies to everyone. Given the presence of extra content on most DVDs, not to mention DVDs for TV programs where multiple episodes appear on a single disc, a menuing system for accessing that content makes a ton of sense. In fact, one of the reasons I haven't bothered to try and rip my DVD coll

        • One of the reasons I haven't bothered to try and rip my DVD collection is that no format will *preserve* those menus (and all the content they provide access to), save for a straight ISO rip, which has the problem of immense size.

          I believe it is possible to do exactly this with Matroska, as described here [aperiodic.net].

          --bornagainpenguin

        • Indeed, a menuing system makes a ton of sense.
          However, what may be more discutable is the way DVD/Blu-rays boot straight to the menu. Personally, I would have preferred if they started the movie right away (the menu would be still accessible from a keypress). I don't really need a menu to set up the audio track or the subtitle track - most hardware of software players allow to do this without interrupting the movie.
          And of course, as you said, booting straight to the movie doesn't make a lot of sense for T

        • And as an aside, the reason BR is DOA is that a) they're frickin' expensive

          Since when?

          Most of the Blu-Ray disks I've bought of older movies have been cheaper than the equivalent DVD was when it came out, and the last few box sets of TV shows have been only a few dollars more than the same show on DVD... if not less, in some cases.

          That's not to imply that some Blu-Ray disks aren't crazily priced, but most would have looked like a bargain compared to when I started buying DVDs in the 90s. The whole 'Band of Brothers' TV show on Blu-Ray cost me about $35, for example.

          Then again, if y

      • The DVD menus are nowhere near as annoying as fast-forwarding and rewinding tapes.. I'll take an extra 10-30 seconds of useless intro over that any day.

        • Yep. DVD killed VHS because it was easy to use and a lot more robust. No rewinding the tape when you finished. No stuffing the tape back into the cartridge when it spat the dummy. No fingerprints, fuzzy lines, and pictures wrapping vertically up and down the screen.

          The menus are a PITA, but they are still better than VHS.

          Also, the "special features disks" are pain. Would it be a huge ask to clearly mark those things? Big red letters with "special features" would save people a lot of time and frustration.

      • Re:Blu-ray is dead. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MichaelSmith (789609) on Friday November 13, @02:01AM (#30084176) Homepage Journal

        In recent years I have rented two DVDs where the previews were unskippable. Thats annoying. And in the future:

        This disk has been licensed for three viewers. To proceed beyond the anti pirating presentation your player must detect three viewers facing the screen with eyes open for the entire 20 minutes.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by selven (1556643)

          So when I pirate my movies, with no unskippable anything, I get a superior product? Did any of these people take a basic economics course?

        • Plus you can change settings like language and subtitles via the player's menu; always at the same place, you don't have to stop the movie, go to the menu, find the settings, etc.

          I own a 50$ Philips DVD Player & I can change subtitles etc through the remote without going to the main menu!

        • Re:Blu-ray is dead. (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Megane (129182) on Friday November 13, @08:34AM (#30085856)

          I sure as hell don't. Standard def DVDs look like shit on a large (>30 inches) set, especially with all the annoying DVD artifacts. Give me the high-definition movies and tv shows please.

          Turn down your fucking Sharpness control. This is one of those crap options that add noise to the picture just make things look better in the sales room. For most TV sets, the correct setting is ZERO, though some sets (notably Sony) support negative sharpness and the zero setting is in the middle of the bar.

          Most of the "artifacts" of DVD are actually due to this. I've even seen completely player-generated screens (not based off of MPEG or JPEG) have "artifacts" because of the ringing from Sharpness.

    • They probably want to drive up the sales... of their games. I don't really see anybody to be more inclined to shell money out because of a game demo. In the other way however, it might be more effective, as a distribution channel. If the game demo is already available on a disk you own, you might be more tempted to try out the demo, especially if it's from a game you have never heard about.
    • I agree the movie quality shouldn't suffer. However many disks do have some space left over so why not use it?

    • Blu-Ray discs are 50GB. The video file for the movie "Love Actually" is 40GB. I'm only allowed to download 250GB a month.

      How do you expect this to work?

    • 1080p screen, PS3 player. Same movie on DVD and Blu-ray (both over HDMI straight from PS3 to screen), the Blu-ray version wins hands down. The difference is night and day. Maybe that points to my screen being a dumb 1080p monitor and not trying to enhance the crappy DVD picture quality. Some friends have really nice 1080p Sony TVs and their DVD quality (also through a PS3 over HDMI) is noticeable better, likely due to their TV doing extra image processing on the video signal that mine doesn't.

      • Also check if your PS3 is doing any up-scaling. Your friends might have this turned on while you don't. I'll still agree the difference is night and day but I'd advise checking anyway.
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