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Comment by HDBaseT | Hacker News Reader

A PS5 Bluray can hold 100GB of data, sure some AAA titles are in excess of 100GB, although that is still 100GB that the player doesn't have to download, plus they enable re-sell-ability and partially maintain the status quo of "owning" a title.

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How much of that 100GB is actually optimized usage? I suspect that a hard cap on the size of the game would lead to a better quality product. The size inflation of games has literally gone insane. I was looking at my Steam library and Tekken 7 was taking up close to 100GB of space which makes absolutely no sense, because it has the same fundamental gameplay as Tekken Tag 1 which was released on a 700MB CD ROM for the PS2's launch.

Tekken 7 does not need to be 100GB.

And with improvements in procedural rendering, textures and environments should become more compact than pre-rendered (and games should load faster as well.)

Uncompressed resources for faster rendering.

It's weird to say this, but BD (including 4K UHD BD) is actually really old tech. Sony was talking about quad-layer discs back before they deleted the mandatory disc caddy from the draft BD spec! OK, practically speaking nobody had their hands on a quad-layer disc until BDXL in the mid-2010s, but even then that's still old.

As for why nobody's made a higher-capacity disc... well, they did. It was even an industry standard. You just never heard about it because it was exclusively intended to be a replacement for tape libraries. I guess rolling out this tech to consumers was just too impractically expensive?

You can absolutely do resale rights with solid-state media, too. On the other hand, the Switch library is littered with games that require downloading an update in order to play. Switch 2 went further and had games that shipped as a pure license key with no data storage. The underlying economics of game distribution are actually really unfavorable to any amount of overhead. Hell, the reason why physical games even still exist AT ALL is because we can press BDXLs for pennies.

Going back to the stagnation in optical media, the read performance hit a wall a while back, too. You basically can't stream anything off these discs anymore. Hell, some Internet connections might actually be faster than an install from optical media! So that's not really the advantage people think anymore either.

The resale ability is basically the only reason to keep physical media around, though - and I'm surprised we haven't seen a renewed attempt to kill physical. I mean, with movies, most stores have already removed their BD sections; you basically can only buy those online or at some Barnes & Noble stores.

I've read just a few days ago that the sale of physical media is going up again. Even just slightly.

https://www.techradar.com/televisions/blu-ray/weve-seen-an-i...

> Switch 2 went further and had games that shipped as a pure license key with no data storage.

Those at least are able to be resold, which is a large step above a one-time-use license key.

I was completely unaware that PS5 discs could hold that much data! But that leads me to the next question, what is the read time look like on that? lol. I found this manual on google for the ps5 disc drive, but I don't understand these units.

Read speed BD-ROM (66 GB/100 GB) ~10×CAV BD-ROM (25 GB/50 GB) ~8×CAV BD-R/RE (25 GB/50 GB) ~8×CAV DVD ~3.2×CLV

Doesn't really matter, PS5 games can't be played from disk anyway; they have to be installed to the SSD first.

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