Sometime during the past year, one of the Playstation 3′s advantages started to turn against it. Every PS3 has a hard drive and almost all of them are 40GB or larger. Mine are 60GB. Xbox 360 by contrast has the bulk of it’s consoles with only 20GB hard drives. I would guess that more of them have no hard drive than the 120GB Elite model that I bought. Particularly given all of the downloadable content offered by Xbox Live, the Xbox hard drives are undersized. This put Sony in a position to capitalize on leading in the download space. With the recently updated Playstation Store still lacking any movie or music downloads, Sony hasn’t really taken advantage of the opportunity.
Now, a new problem has crept in. The Blu-Ray drive that is probably the systems dominant selling feature right now is excruciatingly slow as a game disk reader. After getting my Xbox 360 I was shocked to see how much faster it loaded than my PS3. The PS3 was supposed to be the more advanced machine with a next generation media drive, but loading was a problem.
The first way that developers sought to alleviate the loading issue was by duplicating content on the disc. For instance a texture of a door might be used at the beginning and end of the game. If the texture is on the disc only once, the drive has to cycle back to find it. If you duplicate the file in the relevant section of the disc, it will read faster. This strategy led to some mildly poor PR early on when it was found that games touting how big the game files were conveniently ignored the duplicated content. Quotes about how games “wouldn’t have fit” on an Xbox DVD may actually have fit or been close without the duplicate content.
Now another solution has cropped up. The hard drive install. It is faster than the duplicate content solution and also allows the developer to use more of the disc. Now for the bad part. The hard drive installs are regularly taking 4-5GB of space. The process itself can take 20 minutes! That isn’t a console, it is a PC. The 40GB PS3s that have been selling over the past year would only fit 8 games at that install size. I can just see it a couple of years from now. You’ll be deleting old games to fit new ones. Want to play an old title out of your library? Be prepared for a 20 minute install and to delete something else.
Sony is in a tough place with this one. Hardware installs provide more competitive performance around loading times and may perform better than the Xbox 360. However, this slippery slope may create more problems than it is worth over the next couple of years. Personally I think I’d rather deal with some loading than give away massive amounts of hard drive space. At least then I wouldn’t have to wait 20 minutes before playing the game at all.
Add that to my Sony Playstation 3 hardware refresh list. 1) Add an IR port for on-off with a universal remote. 2) Fix the form factor to fit in a standard stacked media cabinet. 3) Put in a faster Blu-Ray drive to eliminate load-time work arounds.
