"Tired of mandatory hard drive installs on PlayStation 3? Blame Blu-ray and DVD.
Capcom took a public stoning last month when “Devil May Cry 4″ was released on PS3 with a mandatory 20-minute installation not necessary on Xbox 360.
Since then, Capcom VP of business development and strategic planning Christian Svennsson told me his company didn’t realize the issue would “blow up.” He says the company will take the response into account for future releases.
Figuring out why some games require these installs has been like pulling teeth. Publishers don’t want to talk about it, and Sony won’t come clean for them. I contacted multiple parties — chiefly Capcom, Sony, and Ubisoft — while researching this story and hit stone walls at almost every turn.
Nonetheless, we’ve been getting close to an answer, and everything comes back to a developer spending enough time to understand the unique characteristics of Blu-ray. It’s Blu-ray’s “fault,” but not because it’s slow tech. It’s just different tech.
This is what I’ve learned:
The PS3 version of “Lost Planet” requires installs, too. As does “Lost: Via Domus” and “Hot Shots Golf” from Sony. But “Dark Sector” and many other PS3 releases don’t.
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."
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