Maybe I'm mistaken and developers are crying out for the opportunity to produce more content for the same money, and wish XB360 had a BRD drive so they could expand more. Given what I hear about grumbling costs and competition and whatnot, I find that hard to believe!
Not to mention how slow the brd drive is, it was a pain in the ass to deal with. Throwing more data on it just increases the problem of being able to get access to it due to that slowness.
Firstly, I don't know what the extra fess are per disk - but at £1 - a 5m selling game will cost £5m more...for no good reason other than MS rushing the X360 out. Sure DVD was the best 'off the shelf' but remember, initially there was to be a small gap between launches, so to suggest it was the only option is way off the mark.
If you are truly concerned and bothered by the extra costs devs are hit with due to that second dvd, then you would be utterly appaled by the extra costs devs are hit with for PS3 development. It's more complex in every way shape and form due to stuff like slower optical drive, slower graphics card, less memory, worse tools, and compounding it back in 2009 when I was still in the biz Sony was pressuring devs to get their versions of games to look as good as 360 versions with said lesser hardware and tools. The mere existince of the PS3 as it is had a significant effect on dev costs and dev time on every dev out there.
The interesting thing is the X360 will be around for a couple more years yet - more and more devs will be hitting this limitation, much like when MS said X360 didn't need HDMI it seems they were wrong.
In a typical 5/6 year gen dvd was plenty. They've stretched this gen to 8 years so a single dvd is tight and no longer adequate for all games. Turns out though you can just ship two dvd's and the problem is magically solved. On the other hand you can't get around the limited gpu and memory on the PS3, so if limits truly are a concern to you then you should voice them to Sony for holding the industry back and causing everyone to have to spend more money and time to develop games.
I don't think that's true. There's no evidence or suggestion Sony have a mandate saying "you can't publish on our platform if yout textures are of lower quality" or the like, and we see PS3 titles being inferior. This isn't really about performance, but content. Whether this move from MS is affecting how much content devs put on disc, I don't know, though I would like to find out! Would devs really use more of BRD's capacity if it weren't for wanting to maintain parity to be allowed to publish on 360? I find that hard to believe, but it's quite an important question in my mind as it's suggestive that one thing holding back technology is business practice.
Sony never had anything official back when I was still in games, but they were "unofficially" starting to apply pressure to make use of bluray space. But the problem was two fold, first at the time (2009) we didn't need it, but also even if we did with the limited memory and optical drive speed on the PS3 it wasn't easy to use in a way that made an appreciable difference to graphics on typical games. It's not like spu memory which sounds small at 256k, but you can still process megabytes of data thru them because it's all sequantially processed. With graphics you need to have all data resident in memory at one time to draw what you see on screen. Memory was so limited that texture res actually dropped in some case compared to games earlier in this gen because as people started using more layers and more post processing there wasn't enough memory to go around to be able to render a scene. Other stuff like limited af, etc, also limit effectiveness of higher res assets. So while it would be great to use better quality assets and more of them on the PS3 version, there was just no way to do it for a given scene.
In any case, every now and then a game will come around and do something new and be able to effectively use more disc space even on the currently very limited consoles. Obvious examples are LA Noire and Rage. You'll note that both of those games are multi disc games on the 360, 3 discs and 2 discs respectively.
Except this particular move by MS would lock those games out of 50% of the HD market. Sony aren't going to be able to convince devs to lose half their revenue in favour of a spending more on assets for a PS3 exclusive!
I don't think the power is all in MS/Sony's hands like people here think. The only games affected this deep into this gen regarding disc space will be some AAA games. If MS was indeed dumb enough to force size to one dvd, then nothing stops say Rockstar from going to Sony and saying hey, cut us a deal and GTA5 is a PS3 exclusive. It's the games that make the platform hence why MS bent over backwards to get all the former PS3 exclusives. For them to risk all that seems retarded to me. For what it's worth, I got out of the biz in 2009, and they had no such policy back then.
Average users are stupid
Most are happy playing with non-existing view distance and awful texture quality and sub-720p resolution with relatively bad AA and 30-ish and below FPS. They'll be happy as long as marketing hype tells them it's the greatest thing ever
Nah, many of us have already gone back to playing games on PC
