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 his favorite console brand has not been successful. While Blu-Ray is still used for the physical distribution of console games, it hasn’t been as successful as CD and DVD, and the reasons 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 doing Lobby. The key? The successor to one of the most successful consoles in history as a workhorse for the implementation of the format. The loser? The HD-DVD format, which was still a variant of conventional 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, 25 GB compared to 15 GB, however, this feature was a double-edged sword, since it increased the latency in the search time of the random data. In other words, it ended up being an ideal format for high-definition movies, but a disaster when it comes to running programs. In other words, while CD and DVD were ideal for continuous media and computer support, Blu-Ray was not.
From there to it being a failure, PlayStation 3, the console that had to be the ambassador of the format, came out at a premium and the reason for this is that it required a storage unit to work. Facing random access, Blu-Ray access is so slow that installing a game or an application from it is tedious and its direct use is unfeasible. In the midst of the birth of broadband internet, this proved deadly for the format, as PC applications made the leap to distribution over the internet as soon as they could.
Why is it still used on consoles?
The thing about video game consoles is something to get your hands on your head. In a world where everything is connected to the internet and is part of our daily lives and in which the vast majority of console game collections have been purchased digitally, we still have people corseted in the physical format just because It takes them back, according to them, nostalgically to 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 a gig. So in the face of store distribution it is the best. However, we understand the fact that people want to have a backup copy and not a benefit that can be unilaterally taken away from the user. That is, the fact that the game is tangible gives a feeling of ownership of the product.
However, and unfortunately, consumer trends are what they are and that there are models of the new generation consoles without a reader already indicates where the consumer trend is going. In a few years they will be part of the past and will be remembered as the format that was the decline of optical discs.
