I've heard alot of people saying that the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is or isn't like the old Beta/VHS saga, so I thought I'd put in my two cents. Originally this was going to be part of a larger essay taking about arguements for or against the PS3, but that was too long and too lame to be of any real interest.
Required Reading:
GamePro Q&A: 5 Questions for Phil Harrison be sure to catch the last question on the second page.
The thing about saying programmers like more storage is like saying the public likes lower taxes. Give programmers more storage, more RAM, more processor speed, and they will love it. It allows them to worry less about being efficient and focus more on doing impressive things with their games. In general, giveing programmers more storage is a good thing. But is the 20 gigs for Resistance: Fall of Man from game assets? How much is high resolution movies? What's the audio compression? That number gives no real indication how the space is being used.
When I got Lunar 2 for the Playstation, one of the making of videos talked about some tweaking they did in the base code to make the game run a little better. One of the improvements they made was to shink the size of the save file from 16 blocks in the original Japanese version to less than one block for the US version. I'm not saying this is typical, but programmers can often extract more performance or space if given the time. And to be honest, I haven't been hearing much grousing about the "small" amount of space on the Xbox 360 disks but I've heard plenty about how hard the PS3 is to program.
The point I'm trying to get to is that the idea that the Blu-Ray drive is just there to enhance the game experience and the movies are a cheap side affect is a load of bull. Yes, if you have a Blu-Ray drive, turning it into a player is a very cheap addition, but the need to have a Blu-Ray drive is over blown. This is entirely about Blu-Ray winning the new format war.
While there is some debate on the issue, I think the reason VHS beat Beta was because they were more open with their licencing. There were more companies making VHS players, more studios making videos for VHS, and very importantly, VHS didn't lock out porn. So VHS had more innovation, more content, cheaper players, and porn. And before you discount porn, 70% of first year VHS sales were porn. Before VHS, you needed a reel to reel projector to watch porn at home, or head to a movie theater. Being able to enjoy porn in the privacy of your own home was huge. After the first year, then all the secondary factors, cheap players, etc. came into effect.
This war is different. Blu-Ray has more studio support, while HD-DVD has cheaper players and Discs. This war really will be settled by the number of players in houses because players equals disc sales, and disc sales equals more studio support, and in the end content will drive the consumers one way or the other. So how does the PS3 figure in? When the PS2 hit the market in the US, there were 22 million to 48 million households with the ability to play DVDs. (22 million with players, 48 million with players or DVD-ROMs) By the end of the year, when 1.5 million PS2 units had sold, those numbers were 39 million households with players and 60 million with either a player or a DVD-Rom. Assuming no households had a DVD player and a PS2, PS2's would only be about 5% of all players on the market.
Sony wants to sell around 1 million PS3 units by the end of 2006 in the US. I don't know how many Blu-Ray players have sold so far, but I bet 1 million PS3s will represent 50% or more of the Blu-Ray players in households. A not so trivial percentage. Sony is using the demand for the PS3 to fluff the number of Blu-Ray players and make it the winner.
But it may not matter. Companies have already made prototype players that
can play both formats, and there have been developments in making disks with both
formats on one disk. We may have another dvd-r/dvd+r situation where it becomes
a mute point which you pick because every player does both.
And if that is the case, who knows will happen in the end.
