Why PlayStation 3 installations are sometimes forced

Are you tired of mandatory hard drive installs on PlayStation 3 and wanna what the deal is? Well blame Blu-ray and DVD according to a new article on the issue from MTV’s Multiplayerblog.

Capcom took a public lashing in February when Devil May Cry 4 was released on PS3 with a mandatory 20-minute installation not necessary on the Xbox 360 version. Since then, Capcom VP of business development and strategic planning Christian Svennsson told said his company didn’t realize the issue would “blow up.” He says the company will take the response into account for future releases.

According to the article, publishers do not want to talk about why some PS3 games require instals, while others don’t. The PS3 version of Lost Planet requires an install, as does Lost: Via Domus and Hot Shots Golf 5: Out of Bounds from Sony. But Dark Sector and many other PS3 releases don’t.

Apparently the issue arises from differences in the reading techniques of DVD and Blu-ray. By nature, the outer and inner parts of a disc move at different speeds while a disc is spinning, regardless of format (CD, DVD, Blu-ray, HD-DVD, etc.). While DVD drives can read data at those differing speeds, Blu-ray reads at one speed. Combine that with the extremely large size of Blu-ray discs, and simply dumping existing DVD data onto a Blu-ray disc will inevitably result in longer load times. Installations are a way around this issue.

Because when a publisher asks you to install a game on the PS3, it’s because they’re moving some of the disc data to an area of your console that has much faster read access: the hard drive. You get vastly reduced loading times, but have to sit through an installation.

But there are other ways of doing things, as is evidenced by Dark Sector, Call of Duty 4, Burnout Paradise and others, which are all multi-platform titles without installs. Based on conversations with several developers, catering to Blu-ray is hardly impossible, but requires work. Some developers copy their game’s data on the disc multiple times, giving the drive more areas to seek the same exact data from. Others spent time optimizing streaming techniques.

Bethesda Softworks executive producer Todd Howard recently publicly confirmed the duplicated data technique as a strategy on his company’s Fallout 3. “Small things like this can make a huge difference over the course of a game,” he told PlayStation: The Official Magazine.

Some games, like Unreal Tournament III, make the process optional. Epic Games recommends doing it, but if you want to save space, they won’t stop you. In my weeks playing “UT3,” the reduced loading was worth the trouble. The seconds saved between firefights adds up over hundreds of matches.

Share This

• Unreal Tournament III PC beta demo release coming soon
• Unreal Tournament 3 ships 1.2 million copies worldwide
• Unreal Tournament 3 may miss November release date
• Unreal Anthology includes 4 of Epic Games’ FPS catalog for PC
• Unreal Tournament 4 release expected alongside Unreal Engine 4.0 completion