Kotaku: No Retail PS3 Titles on PSN
- Scribbled on July 9th, 2009 by Jonah Falcon
- Filed in Interviews, PlayStation Network, Sony PlayStation 3
Kotaku is reporting Sony’s Eric Lempel is warning off any ideas that Sony will offer full retail games like Microsoft will be this Fall – though they already have offered some titles such as Warhawk on PlayStation Store.
It’s not something we have planned, just because the size of the games is massive. With Blu-ray we can put up to 50 gigs on a dual-layer disc, while [Xbox 360] is still on a 9-gig media. So technically it’s possible, but I think the issue would be, ‘Do you want to download 40 gigs and keep that on your hard drive?
There’s two problems with this statement, however. The first, as Kotaku asks, is that there are plenty of games that don’t take up 40gig – including multiplatform titles. Microsoft will be offering The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – why can’t Sony offer the PS3 version? The second is that the PS3 can use any size hard drive – let the user decide if they want to use up chunks of space on the hard drive. Of course, that’s one of the problems with that system – piracy. You can have someone DL’ing it tons of times on different HDs unless you institute an unpopular limited number of downloads per game.
July 9th, 2009 at 6:47 am
You can switch the hard disc to a bigger one if you want to, but you cannot switch PS3 hard discs between systems as they are locked to one system only.
If you put a hard disc from a different PS3 into another, you will be asked to format the hard disc to make it available to the system. That’s why there is a backup and restore function in the XMB to save your files to a big enough USB device. Even if you take out the drive that comes with the system, and replace it with a bigger one, the original hard disc won’t be recognized until you format it, if you ever want put it back in.
So no, the last sentence with the tons of downloads by a single person is not doable, the only thing that works is game sharing with up to 4 friends on 5 consoles.
July 9th, 2009 at 11:51 am
I think Sony’s obsessed with fighting pirates the hard way (See: PSP), so you can see how they wouldn’t want to make it easier to hack.