Jaffe Would Have Ditched Blu-Ray 125
GameDaily is reporting on comments made by God of War designer David Jaffe. In an interview with Geoff Keighley, Jaffe has stated that he believes Blue-ray should have been removed from the PS3 so that the console could be sold at a lower price point. "Jaffe didn't outright label it a mistake either, but he's the first Sony employee (to this editor's knowledge) to even question the need for Blu-ray. SCE Worldiwide Studios President Phil Harrison and other Sony executives have repeatedly stressed the importance of the Blu-ray format, not just as a next-gen movie format, but as a game disc format that provides game developers with plenty of storage space to build highly detailed game worlds without the need for multiple discs."
I'm not taking tech advice from an evil vizier.. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I'm not taking tech advice from an evil vizier. (Score:1, Interesting)
4 pounds for a pint? (Score:2)
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It's not just electronic good
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Once you pay this, there's often very little difference in the cost of electronic goods. I, and many other I know have found this out to their cost.
Yes, some products do still work out cheaper, but not by a big margin, especially when you consider the higher shipping costs and longer wait. OK, so I've had goods arr
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beer better in the UK? (Score:1)
The seventies called...
English beer is swill. 'Watney's Red Barrel' is easily a match for Bud for its gag inducing quality.
Granted they don't have anything as lame a Spoors light, but who drinks that?
Give me a nice fresh local copy of 'Pilsner Urquel'.
Of course he would (Score:5, Insightful)
There are two ways to use more space:
1) Fill it with content
2) Fill it with useless garbage (like, say, badly compressed cinematics...)
And, as most people know these days, content is EXPENSIVE.
In the interview he talks about (I'm summarizing here, so I'm probably off a little bit) his general distaste for large scale game development now because of how much time and money goes into creating all the content a game requires, and why he's decided he wants to work on smaller games. For someone like him that's aware of how expensive and time-consuming it is to use the amount of space provided by a format like HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, it's not remotely suprising that he thinks putting it in the PS3 was a bad idea.
In comparison, it's quite easy for Sony execs to ramble on about the promise of Blu-Ray and how it enables developers to make games, because if you don't understand something it's easy to lie about it and still look sincere.
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If you don't understand, you're not a liar but ignorant.
And I'm sure games would be a lot cheaper to produce if the developers have to look for every space optimization possible. If they felt 4GB as tight, wait until they got to make games for the next gen in the same space, this time with more detailed textures, bump maps, etc. The HD intro and ending would probably eat half the disc.
But he's not a businessman (Score:3, Insightful)
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Why do people insist on citing these bullshit "analyst" reports? I say "bullshit" for several reasons.
The first is that consoles often have custom parts. Yet none of these price-estimate report (teardown or not) ever explain how they calculated the cost of these custom parts. And I'm just supposed to be
Not all analyst reports are equal (Score:2)
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Even if Sony decided to keep the same price and pocket the difference as profit (or reduced losses), ditching the Blu-Ray and its cost would give them a lot of flexibility which they do not have right now.
Sure, they could still have charged 500-600 bucks per system.
But they would ALSO have the option to lower the prices and/or upgrade their bundles to be more competitive, at any point, without dipping so much into the red ink.
Even as a time-limited offer, a 100 bu
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ATTN Dave (Score:4, Funny)
Also, do you have any empty cardboard boxes near your desk? If so, don't throw them away just yet. They may come in handy.
-- Phil H.
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Is that how it would really go down? While it would appear that Jaffe is speaking in a manner that is against the grain with his employer, I think what we're seeing here is really symptomatic of a bigger problem within Sony's ranks:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/sony_pr.h tml [wired.com]
So basically the two factions of this company have formed a yin-yang of suck so powerful, that it's becomming it's own worst enemy. One day, it'll have to choose between ripping i
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Why, this company was split into factions by country. The two factions didn't get along, and didn't consult with each other on major, company affecting projects. Eventually, the company died. The whole sordid story is here:
Project Mars: Anatomy of a Failure [eidolons-inn.net]
movies (Score:4, Interesting)
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How will they win with Blu-Ray by losing on the vehicle for it? If nobody buys your PS3, you haven't make Blu-Ray more widespread.
Sony could end up making neither the PS3 nor Blu-Ray popular. I certainly plan on owning neither.
Cheers
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Have a nice day now, don't feed your fellow trolls.
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I'm not saying nobody is buying them (OK, I actually said that, but I guess I didn't literally mean zero, my bad) -- but, they sold more PS2s than PS3s -- that can't be good. And, a lot of people have cast doubt on their sales figures as being a little inflated. Certainly I hear a lot of expressed lack of enthusiasm for the PS3.
My
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True, but there's a reason for that...cheap latecomers to the party like me
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Wanna bet?
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Sure, lets bet. Unfortunately I'm lazy and only found numbers for WorldWide sales in 2004.
Video / DVD Sales [edwardjayepstein.com] - $20.9 billion
Portable / Console game sales [pcvsconsole.com] - $18 billion
I didn't include hardware or accessories. So... I dunno is $20 fair?
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Sony wants BOTH and blur-ray is the way to do it.
Even if blu-ray fails for movies, why can't it be a game machine format? Have you ever seen a movie off a N64 Cartrdige? Why didn't we all mock Ninentdo for making a 'propietary' cartridge back then? Is the DS lite cartridge forma
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The game division of sony has
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And he's right (Score:2, Interesting)
This is total garbage. Swapping disks isn't that difficult and happens infrequently if done correctly.
Everytime we get a larger format, we get a slower drive. The PS2 when it came out wasn't as fast as it's CD counter parts. And the blue-ray and hd drives are not as fast as DVD drives now.
It's all a gimmick - Sony wants to push their format. Unfortun
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Just like swapping floppy discs, eh? At one time, people moaned about CDs and how it didn't matter if you had to swap several floppies - afterall, who needed CDs? Just like memory, processing speeds, you name it - the list goes on.
More than a decade later, here we have the same tired arguments regarding another new technology, in this case, Blu-ray. And FWIW, Blu-ray (not "Blue-ray") isn't a proprietar
Disc swapping is a design constraint (Score:5, Insightful)
I have played games with multiple discs. What "happens infrequently" translates to, is that there is some event in the game world that cannot be reversed or recovered from, that you play first all on one disc, and then on the second one until the game is done.
You can minimize disc swapping, but it comes at the expense of non-linearity. A game does not have to be non-linear to be fun (plenty of very linear games are great) but it does mean sandbox games have to suffer the constraint of space instead of allowing them a broader range of content to roam in without swapping.
Furthermore, what you are not factoring in is the per-unit costs that multiple discs entail - you are doubling pressing costs, and also increasing case costs as well (though that is more minimal). Since that is a physical per-unit cost it means you have even more units to sell before you break even, so studios would far rather cut content or increase compression than go to a two-disc solution - not to mention the design costs of deciding you need two discs mid-stream and the extra work that takes.
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If a Blu-Ray disk and a DVD9 cost the same to produce that might be true, but it isn't. Currently it's cheaper to press 2 DVD9 disks than 1 Blu-Ray disk, but either way it's immaterial. Since consoles moved
It always matters (Score:2)
As for pressing costs, I'm not so sure you can press two DVD's for the price of one Blu-Ray anymore - thanks to the PS3 and movie sales, there have been a fair number of discs pressed and the pressing costs are going down pretty rapidly. Eventually they are predicted to reach DVD pressing prices, and then my point stands - which is important as I am talking about long-term
No, he's not right! (Score:1, Insightful)
Moreover, the major CD counterparts to the PS2 were:
Sega Saturn (previous gen)
PSX (previous gen)
PC (not a console)
Sega Dreamcast (I don't want
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Lack of DVD playback (the PS2 sold a lot in Japan first and foremost as a cheaper DVD player) and lack of backward compatibility (preceding Sega consoles - except the Mega CD - were cartridge-based) killed the Dreamcast.
PS2 as cheap DVD player when DVDs were starting to come into the marketplace == PS3 as cheap Blu-ray player when Blu-ray is starting to come into the marketplace. "But, Blu-ray has HD-DVD as competition, DVD did not have co
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If it was total garbage, then there would be more multi-disk console games than the scant examples that actually exist, no? Disk swapping IS a chore when you are sitting comfortably in your couch, five feet away from the console, instead of right next to the drive bay like PC users do. As another poster pointed out, in order to make disk swaps rare you need to complete one disk worth of game before proceedi
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Certainly, we don't know how things will go over the next couple of months but if the PS3 keeps up the poor sales that it
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The problem is that poor sale for a nex gen console is still MILES away from good sales of a nex gen video system.
The PS3 is considered a luke warm console by selling over 2.5Millions units in the world. This is over an order of magnitude bigger than ANY single HD player, be it bluray or HD-DVD. Even if only 10% o
Without blu-ray I would never have bought one (Score:2, Insightful)
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Something to consider (Score:3, Insightful)
When the things on the top-10 lists of the new formats are barely pushing 1000 units a week, what's the incentive to produce content on them? If I were selling something I'd made, I'd want to hit the biggest market possible. Right now, the prohibitive costs that the blu-ray format incurs on the PS3 console are limiting that market, so content producers are going to be understandably pissed. Unless Sony's subsidizing development costs for exclusive titles, which I doubt they'd do if they're already taking a hit on the consoles *and* taking licensing fees on the back end.
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Forget discs, concentrate on downloads (Score:1)
This is funny, as I remember saying a similar thing 10 years ago, as I thought PC development should concentrate on making games that could be easily downloaded over a 14.4k modem for ease of distribution. Doom did well out of that idea.
What about his comments on edginess? (Score:2)
Then again, I'm a mid-20s male anime fan who can hardly watch anime targeted at the mid-20s male anime fan anymore because of the preponderance of moé. Maybe I'm an o
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We'll find a good use for the space (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, we won't use it right away, but the idea is to futureproof the damn thing. Did we originally have all of the PS2 games on DVD's? I seem to remember the earlier Madden games for PS2's still being on CD's....
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Funny... (Score:2, Insightful)
Please stop saying "price point" (Score:2)
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They are using "price point" to say "price".
And it sounds really, really stupid.
Just "price" is fine, and it's less typing too!
Well there's quite a few responses to the point (Score:2)
To my knowledge there aren't any 2 disk 360 games (or even any DVD based games that immediately spring to mind). Two reasons spring to mind, 9gig is enough for a game and/or publishers don't want you to be able to give a disk to your mate when you've gone passed half way. Oh and whilst on the subject, I was under the impression that PS3 cached to the HD as the transfer speed on Blu-Ray wasn't quite up to it (I seem to remember reading somewhere that you c
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To my knowledge there aren't any 2 disk 360 games (or even any DVD based games that immediately spring to mind).</quote>
What about Blue Dragon?
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To my knowledge there aren't any 2 disk 360 games (or even any DVD based games that immediately spring to mind). Two reasons spring to mind, 9gig is enough for a game and/or publishers don't want you to be able to give a disk to your mate when you've gone passed half way. Oh and whilst on the subject, I was under the impression that PS3 cached to the HD as the transfer speed on Blu-Ray wasn't quite up to it (I seem to remember reading somewhere that you co
The only game I know (Score:2)
And have you ever thought that the reason people stick to the 9 gigs on Sony ports is because they really don't want to pay to produce the extra content? I would probably argue that the 360 is limiting the space to 9 gigs before I argued that the BluRay is way too big to be filled. The same thing has been said about CDs and DVDs. It's moot to try and even arg
But without Blu-Ray on the PS3 ... (Score:1)
Blu-Ray advantages (Score:1)
Forget UV discs... (Score:4, Funny)
Le Ray est mort (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:Is the space really needed in the PS3 (Score:5, Interesting)
It is nonsensical to say that something isn't "powerful enough" to use storage space, so I guess I don't know what you really meant to say.
However, I'd like to point out that there were games for the PS2 that spanned multiple DVDs, so the demand for media bigger than a single DVD already existed with the previous generation of consoles.
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However, I'd like to point out that there were games for the PS2 that spanned multiple DVDs, so the demand for media bigger than a single DVD already existed with the previous generation of consoles.
Yes, "there were games". But how well did they do? Just because the games exist does not necessarily mean there is a high demand for them. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that most of these were role-playing games (bad ones, at that - the Xenosaga series comes to mind) wherein the only reason multiple discs was necessary was to store the data for the cut-scenes contained in the game. From what I see at Metacritic [metacritic.com], none of the 62 games with a score of 90 or above are more than one disc (many of them
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Will game des
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And for the record i have neither PS3, Xbox360 or Wii, so i'm not trying to stick up for anyone and say anyone is better than anyone else.
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Quite a few games, going back to the days of the Dreamcast, take up way more space on the disc that in used for anything m
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I could release my game on a single DVD by compressing every file gzip or equiv. compression schemes, or I could release a bluray disk with all the assets uncompressed. This would lower CPU usage substantially while asset loading, but it incurs the overhead of aprox. 2x I/O read times. So, the question is which is the biggest slowdown (remembering that the seek times are identical in this case)?
Seeing just briefly from http://www.gamespot.com/pages/profile/show_blog_en try.php?topic_ [gamespot.com]
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Even as late as 1997 you had games like Final Fantasy VII where "WHOA! IT TAKES THREE DISCS!" was a bit of a deception when the actual game content fit on one disc and the sequence of three was only required due to, you guess it, space-filling movie
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On the other hand, I suspect most studios don't bother with that.
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Even then, this is a pretty small number when you consider how many multi-disc games there were for the PS1. Also consider that two of the better release titles for the PS2 came on DVD (DOA, SSX) and both clearly showed that DVD was needed for games due to its larger storage capacity. Event then, most PS2 games barely necessitated a dual-layer disc, so I really don't see the pressing need for the jump fro
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Even so, reading data off the PS3's blu-ray drive is slower than reading it from the 360's drive, which could cause some performance differences when the data is first written to the HDD.
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Well, how much sense would it make to place a dvd-drive on a 386SX? (33Mhz for those that don't know)
Not saying what he said was right, just saying that there are devices that can't make adequate use of a ton of storage...
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Well, how much sense would it make to place a dvd-drive on a 386SX? (33Mhz for those that don't know)
Not saying what he said was right, just saying that there are devices that can't make adequate use of a ton of storage...
Depends on what your doing. Lets say we have a 386sx with all the drivers and OS support for DVD. And all we're doing on the 386 is doing is displaying a 64x64 movie no buffereing linearly. And then you claim it's not powerful enough to use the storage, well for this task it's fine. yes th
Re:Is the space really needed in the PS3 (Score:4, Insightful)
So already a launch title is almost filling up an entire BluRay disk (if it had included both PAL and NTSC video instead of converting NTSC on the fly). A single Dual Layer DVD wouldn't have been able to hold all of Resistance, and probably 2 wouldn't either (remember a good bit of the data would have to be on both disks!). Odds are as more games are developed for the PS3 more and more will come close to needing Dual Layer BluRay disks (50 GB).
Also your comment about the PS3 not being powerful enough makes ZERO sense (data transfer rate would have been a better argument...)
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There is a reason there is only a small minority of console games that ship on multiple disks. Disk swapping is not fun.
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Neither are long, pointless cinematics. I wonder how big those titles would be without cinematics, or with cinematics rendered by the game engine?
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What I'd like to see is a lot more very high resolution textures and some more cool dynamic ones (like TV screens with actual shows on them when you walk into a room). I hate walking up to an Aylid doorway in Oblivion and seeing pixels the size of my finger on the s
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And usually the game is designed so that once you move from disc one to disc two, you don't need to insert disc one anymore.
Come on now, multi-disc games have been a fact of life on consoles ever since the CD drive arrived.
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Games already use it (Score:3, Insightful)
Game artists are working with master art that takes up many more times the amount of space even available on a Blu-Ray disc. If you let them, they will fill it. That does not make by itself for a better game, but if used well can add a lot of atmosphere to an already great game. I'm really looking forward to seeing what the makers of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus do with this...
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Absolutely! Even more so, I would even consider getting a PS3 now, if they released special versions of Ico and Colossus for HD. Wow, Ico in HD
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"I guess the interesting thing to consider is with all this extra space, is it really needed in the PS3."
This is kinda stupid. It's HD gaming, they want as much space as they can. But in theory - and possibly Xbox fanboy land - it could start working it's way towards a valid point. You know, with a bit more background than a vague question, sans question mark. I don't know col
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What I want to see is title that clearly couldn't be fit onto a single DVD due to the game itself - not the fact that it contains 15GB of cutscenes...
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The PS3 can play DVD formatted media just fine. But in all honesty, I really wouldn't like to see DVD format games on PS3. After one of my friends dropped my RFOM disk, I was sold on the protective coating that Blu-Ray disks have. Also, I can live with the slower spindle speed of the Blu-Ray drive as the PS3 is whisper quiet compared to my turbine inspired 360. The noise level of the 360 console is a strong reason why I purchase the PS3 versions of games whenever possible.