Game Makers Support Blu-Ray, so what?

The rally of game developer heavy weights such as Electronics Arts and Videndi Universal Games around Sony’s next generation DVD format Blu-Ray was largely commented in the press recently. I think that it was over-hyped.

“The delivery of high-definition games is becoming increasingly important to us. Blu-ray Disc has the capacity, functionality and interactivity we need for the kinds of projects we have in mind.” (Scott Cronce, Electronic Arts Worldwide Studio CTO.)

True, but HD-DVD, the competing standard would probably be as good for the game industry. Game makers don’t choose to support Blu-Ray, they *have to* support it for the simple reason that the next generation Playstation (PS3) will have it. It does not mean that they won’t support any other format. And by the way, besides the storage capacity, HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, it’s just a gigantic CD-ROM from a game developer’s point of view.