Phil Harrison defends Blu-ray format, smells like gas

Uh-oh! Phil Harrison is opening his mouth again. Time to put PS3Fanboy on spin cycle! Wait... he's actually pretty believable here. In an interview with ThreeSpeech, Phil said that certain PS3 launch titles are already nearing the point of filling the 25GB capacity of Blu-ray discs. This was in response to the notion that Sony was pushing Blu-ray only as a means to go head-to-head with HD-DVD. Next year, Harrison plans, the discs will be 50GB standard and even then "I'd expect that we'll be getting close to that in the fairly near future as well." Meaning 50GB games! Dang. How's about some compression, man? That's just an assumption, but maybe the large sizes are before any compression is done?

Well, what about the claim that other current-gen systems are still using DVD's, Mr. Harrison? "DVD is not sufficient capacity to power the kind of data consumption, or to feed the data consumption needs of Cell and RSX. It's got nothing to do with movies. Just purely as a gameplay device, we need Blu-Ray to supply the kind of data that PS3 games use." Ah, indeed, indeed. That's easy to say, but we'll find out in mid-November if it's true. We'll close with a long, nifty quote. Take it, Phil. "It's not just, as you say, about movies -- it's about 7.1 audio, it's about animation, it's about high resolution textures. If you have a graphics chip capable of displaying the textures in a high enough resolution, the designers would want to exploit that benefit creatively. Don't take my word from it -- there was a great quote from a guy from EA who said that whenever there's a new disc format, you always struggle to think how developers will fill it, but they always do. I suppose that game development is like gas, it expands to fill the available space. Once you have that technical capability, the creative desire to exploit it follows very quickly thereafter." Yes. Game development is like gas.