SirNitram wrote:
This is always a hilarious argument to hear. I'm sorry, I was hearing the same when the CD-ROM was developed. And then I heard the same when the DVD-ROM was made. And yet, for example, FFX nearly filled it's disc with all the crap they put in there.
I'm not saying that the space needs of a video game will never surpass DVD. What I'm saying is that the space needs of game do not scale at the rate of other computing needs. Notice that in the Playstation days, discs were constantly surpassing the needs of the CD, with large games taking up as much as four discs. During the DVD generation, seldom did games surpass a single disc and two was the most ever needed.
A Blu-Ray player would be nice on a current console, but given the costs associated with the technology, I'd say the money would be better spent elsewhere considering that games are unlikely to surpass two DVD-9's, even in this generation.
BTW, most of the time DVD-9 games only exceed a single disc when FMV is used (which is extremely space intensive), something that is becoming less and less common as in game cinematics become better.
Any sort of computer project is a gas. They will fill the availiable space.
Not really, many early Playstation 2 games didn't even use the DVD-9 format and shipped on CD's (that's the difference between the purple discs and the silver ones) and very few ever used two discs, and certainly not four like the Playstation would use. You can only use so much disc space.
Also to the point is the data-retreival speed, which is in the hundreds of megs/second... Just a bit handy for folks not wanting loading times.
True, but load times are dictated by many factors and if Sony really wanted to reduce load times, they would have gone with a standard hard drive. It would have cost them less, and would have provided a superior reduction in load times since not only is a hard drive faster, but the seek times are
much lower (something that isn't going to improve much with Blu-Ray). Raw transfer rate is not often the bottleneck in load times.
Even with this considered, there's one huge factor that will keep Square away from Microsoft: Microsoft simply isn't that badass in Japan. They know their core audience, and it isn't the American market, no matter how much we toss down for our regular doses of FF Crack.
True, but don't forget that America has become a bigger market lately, even for Square. Granted, as far as total market share goes, Sony has the angle, even if you assume Microsoft creams them in the US next generation, however it's not like Square isn't going to lose money going cross platform. They don't need to do exclusives after all.
Really though, I think this is about nationalistic pride. Square is a Japanese company and doesn't like the idea of giving into a foreign console maker. The Japanese are funny about this, and they don't see business as a mass heap of globalization like the rest of the world.
Case in point: both Nintendo and Square came into Microsoft's radar during the early days of the Xbox. Nintendo would have been a perfect aquisition taget, both companies had strengths where the other was weak (Microsoft had the platform, the support structure and the money and Nintendo had the games plus the built in Japanese audience), but Nintendo's CEO said in no uncertain terms that there was no way in hell that he would sell out to an American company.
Square was a bit different, according to rumor, they did actually make a proposal to Microsoft, but aparently it was ridiculously high (something on the order of five times their market cap) so it was rejected.
