I've done some speculation on my own part about the DVD vs. Bluray disk as a format for gaming, and I've realized a potentially serious and huge potential problem with sticking with DVDs. It goes like this: Assume that DVDs are 8GB in size (for simplicity's sake) and that a game you want to make needs 20GB of data. Initially, you may think that since 8*3 = 24, this game will easily fit on 3 DVDs. However, there's a catch: a lot of the data needs to be on all the disks, such as character models and textures, dialog, NPCs, creatures, items, etc. So you are stuck with making a copy of this data on every disk. Let's assume that this data comes out to be 6GB in size. So if you want to fit this data on 3 disks, you have to have an additional 12GB of storage, or about 32GB total. That's 4 DVDs worth of data now, not 3.
But now you have another problem, because with 4 disks you need another 6GB, bringing your total to 38GB. That needs 5 DVDs to store it. But of course at 5 DVDs the same problem occurs, and now you need yet another DVD. In fact, this problem keeps on going until you will need a total of 7 DVDs, or 56GB of total data storage space before all the data can be made to fit on DVDs. So ultimately, in order to store your 20GB game, you've wasted 36GB, and your 3 disk game balloons into a 7 disk game. Heaven forbid that games never get into the 40-50GB range, at which point you may need something like 10-20 DVDs in order to fit all the data. Or even worse, the game cannot be made at all, if the required data is larger than a single DVD.
So according to my speculation, using only DVDs to store games may in fact be a huge problem down the road, especially if games have a lot of data that needs to be shared across disks. Any thoughts?
But now you have another problem, because with 4 disks you need another 6GB, bringing your total to 38GB. That needs 5 DVDs to store it. But of course at 5 DVDs the same problem occurs, and now you need yet another DVD. In fact, this problem keeps on going until you will need a total of 7 DVDs, or 56GB of total data storage space before all the data can be made to fit on DVDs. So ultimately, in order to store your 20GB game, you've wasted 36GB, and your 3 disk game balloons into a 7 disk game. Heaven forbid that games never get into the 40-50GB range, at which point you may need something like 10-20 DVDs in order to fit all the data. Or even worse, the game cannot be made at all, if the required data is larger than a single DVD.
So according to my speculation, using only DVDs to store games may in fact be a huge problem down the road, especially if games have a lot of data that needs to be shared across disks. Any thoughts?
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