Phil Harrison busts out the doublespeak (again)

[SpiderMonkey]

Sony bashing is the dead horse that you can't squeeze any more blood from, I know. But really, when are Sony going to stop trying to insult my intelligence?

"There's this sort of misunderstanding that the Blu-ray disc player for movies is somehow burdening the console with unnecessary cost.

"That is completely not true. We put our Blu-ray Disc functionality in the console purely from a game design point of view. Once we had that storage capacity on Blu-ray Disc, adding the movie playback functionality was extremely cost-effective, [the cost] is actually non-existent."

If adding a 50Gb storage device, sans movie playback, adds $200+ to the cost and a year to the effective release date of your console, then the decision is simple: Don't add it. Either the PS3's hardware engineers are incompetent in their inability to make those simple decisions, or Phil Harrison is lying. Hmm, I wonder which it could be.

Link

[brkl]

Yeah, that's just a complete lie.

[ysbreker]

Must be the incompetent Sony engineers. They can't even see that forcing your own proprietary format on people doesn't work. After trying it 3 times and failing in a big way.

Maybe a bit of both?

[General Fuzzy McBitty]

We're not even using the entire DVD-disk.... so a Blu-Ray disk is usefull to us how?

[Wrestlevania]

a Blu-Ray disk is usefull to us how?

By ramping up development costs by several orders of magnitude you fool! And what developer wouldn't want that, given the current state of the video games market?

Sony is your friend... love Sony... suckle from their burgeoning tri-nipple of marketing spin, ham-strung proprietary formats and obsessive DRM. Go on, all three at once you dirty slut - you love it.

[polytope]

It's just lovely that BR has a slower read speed than DVD. That'll really help load times, especially when there's 16x as much memory as a PS2 to fill up.

[Oath]

It's just lovely that BR has a slower read speed than DVD. That'll really help load times, especially when there's 16x as much memory as a PS2 to fill up.

As opposed to the 360, you can always have a buffer on the hard drive though, so that'll probably even out in the end.

[elmuerte]

It would have been much easier if they simply used the PC method. E.g. install a game to a harddrive and run it from the harddrive. That way a DVD9 would last for quite some time. But without a proper performing random access drive you need a shit load of storage in order to keep the loading times down.

A 200GB HD isn't very expensive. And you can put quite some game content into 10GB of random accessable data.

Sure the first time you want to play a game it'll take some time to copy the game files to the disk, but you'll save that when you are actually playing the game.

[StarEye]

Phil Harrison:

"There's this sort of misunderstanding that the Blu-ray disc player for movies is somehow burdening the console with unnecessary cost.

"That is completely not true. We put our Blu-ray Disc functionality in the console purely from a game design point of view. Once we had that storage capacity on Blu-ray Disc, adding the movie playback functionality was extremely cost-effective, [the cost] is actually non-existent."

I guess none of you really read what he was saying? He's not saying adding a Blu-Ray drive didn't have an impact on the price, he says that adding movie playback funtionality of said drive doesn't add to the cost.

And elmuerte: that's a horrible idea, it defeats the whole purpose of consoles. Why not just use a PC in that case?

[DanJW]

Star Eye is right, Phil Harrison is engaging in some very clever politician style side stepping. Either that or he has misunderstood what everyone else is saying.

He is correct in saying that once you have the BR drive installed, adding movie playback on top of ROM doesn't cost much. Of course that's not what the general commmunity is saying; WE'RE saying that it was the BR ROM that pushed the costs up, which is true.

OK, he's a metaphor. Imagine a restaurant.

waiter: I'm sorry sir, your meal will take a while longer to prepare, and will be very expensive, because of the blue cheese sauce.

hungry man: Wow. Does it have to have the blue cheese sauce? Because I might not be able to afford that.

waiter: You must have the clue cheese sauce.

HM: Your blue cheese sauce is about to screw you over, because I'm out of here.

waiter: Sir, adding chives to the blue cheese source hardly increases the cost at all. Once we had the the blue cheese sauce in place, adding chives was extremely cost effective.

HM: ...

[brkl]

StarEye is confused. We're saying they didn't add BR for the games, but for the movies.

[DanJW]

Ah, right, I get you now. They're pretending it's for the games.

Aslo, a hard drive based console would still differ from PC in several ways. The main one being that all the hardware and programming platform would be standard, so there is no worry about scaling your game to varying system specs.

[StarEye]

Uhm, why would you think they only added it for movies? It's a new format, they wanted to use their new format, and it'll be used for games as well as movies. And history shows that everyone who says "we'll never need that much space" have always been proved wrong.

Not to mention the fact that almost everything is compressed nowadays, which is the reason why they fit on a single DVD. Same with PC games really, it just copies everything over from the DVD or multiple CDs.

And games on the PS2 already uses DVD9, why wouldn't a PS3 have games that spans even more of them? I already have a 2-DVD game on the PS2, and I know that Final Fantasy XII is supposed to be at least two as well.

And don't forget that currently, all games uses the same textures a million times throughout the game. Well, what if we had enough space to make a lot more unique textures, and thus creating an even more impressive world? I wouldn't mind, that's for sure.

Sorry for the long rant, but this idiotic anti-sony sentiments reminds me of extreme paranoia at times.

[brkl]

Aww, I'm sorry for being so idiotic. Getting their proprietary media to be the one used worldwide is something Sony has tried to do several times. It seems obvious to me that Sony wouldn't put the expensive Blu-Ray drive on PS3 just because it might be useful for games in the future, but rather because Sony is trying to use PS3 to have their format as THE format for High Definition movies. It's risky, but there's a huge potential of income for Sony if they finally succeed.

[Wrestlevania]

PlayStation 3 = Blu-Ray 'Trojan horse'

Simple as that.

[StarEye]

ah, but it's only bad because it's Sony, isn't it? They've been into the gaming business for years now, it's not like the thought "hey, let's make a blu-ray player and disguise it as a Playstation 3", is it?

But I guess, they see the PS3 as a movie-player then, and don't care about gaming at ALL. ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, Gran Turismo and such is the proof of that, isn't it? I mean, they want to own the movie-market, not the gaming market, surely?

People act like Sony's out to get them, for some reason, and that's just plain irrational.

And I don't see what the problem is anyway, they also have a 60gig for the "premier pack", and it costs as much as my first PS2 cost me. The price is basically identical. It's like the people who complaint about game prices, when the games cost so much more to produce than 20 years ago, while still maintaining the same price. We, in the "rich" part of the world are so spoilt, I'm embarressed to be a part of it.

[brkl]

I fucking hate those Sony nazi fucks.

[n0wak]

People act like Sony's out to get them, for some reason, and that's just plain irrational.

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/11/14/sony_anticustomer_te.html

http://www.vnunet.com/personal-computer-world/news/2043236/nice-ebook-shame-drm

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=auiwUKsr.ykY&refer=japan

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060313-6366.html

Not to mention the fact that it took abyssmal sales before Sony clued in to the fact that people like mp3s on their portable music players and not some shitty proprietary ATRAC.

How's that UMD movie format doing too?

Yes, it's because it is Sony. It is like that because Sony have been doing one idiotic thing after another for the last few years. Many anti-customer things. Well beyond what they've been saying about the PS3 and PSP. This is what happens when the media division dictates to the hardware division what should be done.

Of course they've done good things in the meantime, despite the above, but those don't generate the kind of PR that the above items do. But please don't act as though any anti-Sony sentiment is the result of biased, uninformed "fanboysim". Sony have themselves to blame.

[Wrestlevania]

But please don't act as though any anti-Sony sentiment is the result of biased, uninformed "fanboysim". Sony have themselves to blame.

Quite, and well put too.

If anything, I applaud Sony's gall at casually placing Blu-Ray at the heart of the latest itteration of the world's most recognised Video game brand. Even if they are so desperate to succeed that they're slitting their own throats in order to do it.

I can't imagine anything more than a tiny minority giving two shits about Blu-Ray being included in PlayStation 3, which would likely be a) Sony diehards, and; movie tech-nerds after the latest disc technology. Gaming certainly doesn't need it for manifold reasons, two which immediately come to mind being that:

1. Developers will feel obliged to fill those discs, yet be saddled with slower read rates than supposedly-inferior DVD technology (both aspects much to their chagrin perhaps)
2. Suddenly, vastly increased media capacity encourages greater reliance on eye-candy to provide the actual "meat" of a game

And if you're going to call me a liar on that second point, you need to recall what happened to gaming when CD-ROM first showed up in the early-to-mid 90's...

[Marek]

Well to be fair, Bluray could have an impact on games, the same way the modern GTA would not be possible without streaming content from DVDs. However, looking at the complete arsenal of technical advances available, Bluray seems one that will have the least true benefits for games.

you need to recall what happened to gaming when CD-ROM first showed up in the early-to-mid 90's...

Yes, the early years of CD-ROM were a festival of shovelware, and it also killed early successes in digital distribution (read: shareware). But DVD did not have the same negative effect, and I doubt Bluray would either, especially in this multiplatform/broadband era.

[toblix]

And don't forget that currently, all games uses the same textures a million times throughout the game. Well, what if we had enough space to make a lot more unique textures, and thus creating an even more impressive world? I wouldn't mind, that's for sure.

The repetition of (small) textures aren't due to media storage limitations, but rather limitations in the graphics hardware and software.

[miffy495]

Don't forget the fact that it would take fucking forever and be really expensive to make all those textures.

[StarEye]

That could be true, I'm not much into technical stuff. But wouldn't we be getting there? The PS3 and Xbox 360 are two very powerful beasts, and I doubt we've seen the best of it yet. Look at God of War on the PS2, I never thought that was possible, it's one of the few games I've been shocked by, and this late in it's life? I know that if the developers are good enough, they can squeeze juice out of a rock, and I can't begin to imagine where the games are going in five years time. After one year on the Xbox 360, I'm finally getting to see what next generation can be about, by playing games like Dead Rising and looking at gameplay videos of Assassin's Creed.

I believe that Rockstar themselves said they had to squeeze a bit to get San Andreas on one dvd, and that's not even a very good looking game, and doesn't include very complex physics either. I believe it will be much less restricting for a developer to have more than enough space than having to constantly think about what they can keep and what they have to remove. As I said, we already have games on two dvd's, I doubt that in five years time it'll be different. And some games just doesn't work on two dvds. Oblivion, for instance, could never work on two dvds, it needs to be one gigantic seamless world, which it already is. And if games are going to get past the size of Oblivion, we'll see a lot of strip downed X360 versions, whereas the PS3 versions will be 100% since it's using Blu-Ray.

Don't forget the fact that it would take fucking forever and be really expensive to make all those textures.

Make a few dozens variations and run them through a randomizer that creates more variations for you? Wouldn't that work to a certain degree? Maybe not, I'm not an expert, not even slightly knowledgable on this kind of stuff, but I do believe a lot of developers uses some kind of generator tools for these kind of things?

[SiN]

The only thing that's going to fill up BluRay discs are FMVs. Trying to fill a BR disc with anything else is impossible.

We can't make significantly higher resolution textures, because the hardware can't handle it. We can't make larger amounts of textures because we don't have the manpower to do it. What we can do though, is have several pre-calculated texture maps over each model (ie: bump maps, normal maps, etc). Sound Fx is already done at 44 KHz, and doing anything higher is a waste of space, since you won't be able to hear the difference. Everything else is dirt cheap. 3D models don't take up much space. And code (including physics, lighting, gameplay, etc) takes up no more than 5 to 10 megabytes.

This generation won't have any content that DVD9 can't hold.

SiN

[DanJW]

And if games are going to get past the size of Oblivion, we'll see a lot of strip downed X360 versions, whereas the PS3 versions will be 100% since it's using Blu-Ray.

No. Please no. I dont want games bigger than Oblivion. I want well crafted gameplay that is small and compact and FUN.

Also, textures are generally tiled. The randomiser thing you describe would not help. The next exciting thing in textures and so fourth will be procedural content, as in Spore, but for that you don't need ROM disc space, just fast processing speeds and lots of RAM, ie stuff in the machine.