Games to be put on blu-ray in the near future?

With the fomat war being over (HD-dvd is dead), does this mean games for PC are gonna start being put on Blu-ray in the next couple of years?

I'll welcome the change. I'm already seeing games come with multiple DVDs (Orange box) so we must be running out of space for dvds.

In the future? Yes.

In the near future? I would imagine not.

DVDs are much cheaper and DVD drives are in just about every gaming computer on the planet. To use blurays so soon would firstly to accept unnecessary expense and secondly to alienate most gamers. No company would choose that.

DVDs were around for at least three or four years before publishers started adopting them as their media of choice - before then, it was simply cheaper to use three, four or even five CDs. I can imagine the same being true of DVDs. We're only just now starting to break through into dual DVD games (and even those are exceptionally rare).

Maybe around 2010-2011 we'll start seeing blueray games, but I seriously doubt publishers would want to start using them right now. I mean, how many people actually have bluray drives? I bet it's less than 10 in any given 100 gamers.

I see your points. Maybe 5 years from now, but not next year.

There are still games being put on multiple CD's today. When I bough The Burning Crusade last year, it had what, 5 CD's?

I don't see it to be that useful for PC-Games , i think that the online vendors like "steam" etc will become the most popular .

And today a blu-ray drive costs more than some PCs do.

In the future? Yes.

In the near future? I would imagine not.

mfsa

I think you've hit the nail on the head.

Orange Box thing is a marketing or packaging decision. A DVD-ROM can hold around 4.5 GB and Valve lists the total hard disk requirement for the OB at 1.8 GB. I haven't seen any single game come on multiple DVDs yet.

The fact that games are still shipping on multiple CDs shows how conservative publishers are about moving to the next newest format.

In PC size of the game is not directed related with the technical quality or resolution. Crysis weights 6 GB and can be played at 1080p; the more important factor in the visual quality are now in the shaders, which requires a high level of performance, not a huge space to the textures. I run Crysis on High at 1680 x 1050 in High at 34 fps under XP (I have a Q6600 oced to 3.0 Ghz, 2 GB DDR 2 800 Mhz and an Asus EN 8800 GTS 512.

But today the blu-ray players to PC cost around 200 € and disc about 10 €; in a couple of years the optical drives will cost near to the today's DVD drives, and the same one with the BR disc. Then nobody will use DVDs as today nobody -sic- uses CDs (well, maybe a few).

There isn't much reason to go Blu-ray on PC any time soon because of the unpacking to HDDs. They can compress the textures they need onto DVD and unpack them on installl. If they want more lossless video and audio they can just expand to multiple DVDs. It doesn't make much of a difference if you only have to switch once on install and forget about it.

As video RAM and the size of uncompressed textures goes up and developers want to keep said textures from lossy compression algorithms blu-ray will become more viable. That is a while in the future at which point blu-ray manufacturing costs will be way down.

In PC size of the game is not directed related with the technical quality or resolution. Crysis weights 6 GB and can be played at 1080p; the more important factor in the visual quality are now in the shaders, which requires a high level of performance, not a huge space to the textures. I run Crysis on High at 1680 x 1050 in High at 34 fps under XP (I have a Q6600 oced to 3.0 Ghz, 2 GB DDR 2 800 Mhz and an Asus EN 8800 GTS 512.

But today the blu-ray players to PC cost around 200 € and disc about 10 €; in a couple of years the optical drives will cost near to the today's DVD drives, and the same one with the BR disc. Then nobody will use DVDs as today nobody -sic- uses CDs (well, maybe a few).

Ondoval

I don't think you quite understood what I meant. Video games have a native resolution. for example, most games on the Xbox 360 have a native resolution of 1280x720. If you play on a 1080p tv, the console must UPSCALE the video to fit the screen. Likewise, if you play on a 4:3 SDTV, the console must DOWNSCALE the graphics to fit on that screen.

With PC games, it works very similar. There's a native resolution that the developers decided on, and they use the game engine to upscale/downscale the image to whatever resolution you set it to.

*correct me if I'm wrong*

[QUOTE="Ondoval"]

In PC size of the game is not directed related with the technical quality or resolution. Crysis weights 6 GB and can be played at 1080p; the more important factor in the visual quality are now in the shaders, which requires a high level of performance, not a huge space to the textures. I run Crysis on High at 1680 x 1050 in High at 34 fps under XP (I have a Q6600 oced to 3.0 Ghz, 2 GB DDR 2 800 Mhz and an Asus EN 8800 GTS 512.

But today the blu-ray players to PC cost around 200 € and disc about 10 €; in a couple of years the optical drives will cost near to the today's DVD drives, and the same one with the BR disc. Then nobody will use DVDs as today nobody -sic- uses CDs (well, maybe a few).

ishkoo

I don't think you quite understood what I meant. Video games have a native resolution. for example, most games on the Xbox 360 have a native resolution of 1280x720. If you play on a 1080p tv, the console must UPSCALE the video to fit the screen. Likewise, if you play on a 4:3 SDTV, the console must DOWNSCALE the graphics to fit on that screen.

With PC games, it works very similar. There's a native resolution that the developers decided on, and they use the game engine to upscale/downscale the image to whatever resolution you set it to.

*correct me if I'm wrong*

I'm pretty sure you're wrong. PC Gaming has no native resolution because there is no set standard resolution. It's done entirely different on consoles because there's only a few resolutions to choose from.

[QUOTE="Ondoval"]

In PC size of the game is not directed related with the technical quality or resolution. Crysis weights 6 GB and can be played at 1080p; the more important factor in the visual quality are now in the shaders, which requires a high level of performance, not a huge space to the textures. I run Crysis on High at 1680 x 1050 in High at 34 fps under XP (I have a Q6600 oced to 3.0 Ghz, 2 GB DDR 2 800 Mhz and an Asus EN 8800 GTS 512.

But today the blu-ray players to PC cost around 200 € and disc about 10 €; in a couple of years the optical drives will cost near to the today's DVD drives, and the same one with the BR disc. Then nobody will use DVDs as today nobody -sic- uses CDs (well, maybe a few).

ishkoo

I don't think you quite understood what I meant. Video games have a native resolution. for example, most games on the Xbox 360 have a native resolution of 1280x720. If you play on a 1080p tv, the console must UPSCALE the video to fit the screen. Likewise, if you play on a 4:3 SDTV, the console must DOWNSCALE the graphics to fit on that screen.

With PC games, it works very similar. There's a native resolution that the developers decided on, and they use the game engine to upscale/downscale the image to whatever resolution you set it to.

*correct me if I'm wrong*

yeah you are pretty much wrong. while I'm sure they spend a lot of time testing the game with 1024x768 and 1280x1024 and the popular widescreen resolutions that monitors support the most (1440x900 and 1600x1050) Crysis scales any which way it wants. Resolution is completely separate from the game if you like. Its just how sharp the image can be. There is no native resolution for PC, only native resolutions for monitors.

Oh and consoles can do the same as well, its just at the end of the rednering they upscale or downscale it to those native resolutions. A few games on 360 and PS3 run below 720p, but upscale at the end.