There are many people who, like Pavlov’s dog, are mentally conditioned and programmed to have irrational emotional reactions to certain stimuli. One of them is to mention to them that something related to their favorite console brand went wrong. Although Blu-Ray is still used for the physical distribution of console games, it has not been as successful as CD and DVD, and the reasons for this are technical limitations.
Blu-Ray is a failure due to its technical limitations
Originally, Blu-Ray was not going to be the successor to DVD, but it was SONY, together with Philips, who decided to use this standard and won by lobbying. The key? The successor to one of the most successful consoles in history as a workhorse for format implementation. The loser? The HD-DVD format, which was still a variant of the classic DVD, but using blue lasers invented by Shuji Nakamura, a Nobel Prize winner who also invented LEDS, which allowed the creation of larger capacity discs.
Blu-Ray, unlike HD-DVD, was a clean slate and had a higher capacity per layer, 25GB versus 15GB, however, this feature was a double-edged sword, as it increased latency over time from searching for random data. In other words, it turned out to be an ideal format for high-definition movies, but a disaster when it came to running programs. In other words, while CD and DVD were ideal for streaming media and computer support, Blu-Ray was not.
From there to failure, the PlayStation 3, the console that was to be the format’s ambassador, came out at a high price and the reason for that was that it required a storage unit to work. In the face of random access, Blu-Ray access is so slow that installing a game or application from it is cumbersome and using it directly is impractical. Amid the birth of high-speed Internet, this proved fatal for the format, as PC applications made the leap to Internet distribution as soon as they could.
Why is it still used on consoles?
The thing with video game consoles is something to get your hands on. In a world where everything is connected to the internet and is part of our daily lives and where the vast majority of console game collections have been purchased digitally, we still have people corseted in physical format just because it takes them back, according to them, nostalgic of the past, but then they hypocritically buy digitally.
If there’s a reason we still have Blu-Ray discs it’s because they’re cheap to mass produce, not for nothing the current cost is 4 cents per gig. So in the face of in-store distribution, it’s the best. However, we understand that people want to have a backup copy and not a benefit that can be unilaterally taken away from the user. In other words, the fact that the game is tangible gives a feeling of ownership of the product.
However, and sadly, consumer trends are what they are and the fact that there are driveless next-gen console models already indicates where the consumer trend is going. In a few years they will be a thing of the past and will be remembered as the format that was the decline of optical discs.
