I used to work at a small video game store. Like any other video game store, people often brought in used games. As an employee, I had a nice benefit: I could take them home and try them for a day or two, and then either bring them back, or purchase them. While that’s perfect for the Xbox 360, and in fact that’s how I fell utterly and hopelessly in love with Burnout Paradise, I only managed to try PS3 games over the weekend. If you have a PS3, forget about popping the disc in and checking the game out. It doesn’t work like that.

You pop the disc into the console. You try to start it, and it says it needs to be installed on the hard drive. This is because the Blu-ray reader is slower than DVD readers, and it would probably be unable to keep up with real-time loading, or it would just make the loading screens stay up longer. The obvious solution is: let’s use that hard drive space! That’s true of every single PS3 game, and you can confirm this by peeking at the back of any game when you happen to be at a retail store; and we’re not talking a few megabytes, oftentimes it’s in the gigabyte range.

After a while, it’s finally installed. You start it, and before you can do anything, you’re told that there’s an upgrade. So you let it install it, otherwise it just won’t play, unless you disconnect from the network. This is extremely silly, and defies any logic: if I am not planning to play online, why do you want me to upgrade it? Just let me play with the older version, but let me play now! After all, that’s what happens if I’m off the network, so why not let me do it anyway? Incidentally, the Xbox 360 gets it right: if an update is available, it offers to download and install it. If you say no, you just won’t be able to play that game online until you update. It makes sense, as it enforces version consistency among online players. The PS3, however, forces you to go through the painful process of downloading and then installing the update. And it takes time, lots of time. My PS3 was connected directly to the router using an ethernet cable, and my DSL is 8 megabits down / 512 kilobits up. Either the updates were huge, or the servers were slow.

Finally, after well over half an hour if you’re lucky, you are ready to play. Too bad it’s late and you have to get up early tomorrow. Ah well. And all of this doesn’t include any system updates, which, as Ars Technica points out, happens fairly often.

It is worth to note that the Xbox 360 only recently (as in: a year and a half ago or so) gained the ability to install games on its hard drive. It’s still usually not mandatory but it can be good to speed up the loading times, to reduce the wear on the discs, and to make the whole thing quieter. A few games do require a mandatory installation when the data spans more than one disc and needs to be available at all times (Forza Motorsport 3 comes to mind), but it’s a small minority, and that’s a very good thing because changing hard drives on an Xbox 360 is essentially a huge and messy hack. The PS3, on the other hand, gets it perfectly right: one screw, and a standard 2.5-inch SATA disk and you’re ready to go. You even get the option to back up your data to an external unit before the surgery and then copy it back to the new disk after it.

Now if only Sony gave up the 16-year-old design of its controllers and accepted that Microsoft got the ergonomics just right…

Everything is great on paper, but falls short in practice. The reason? It’s slow. Really, really slow. And this is not just about my Samsung player, because the PS3 did the very same thing. Something is inherently wrong with BD-J. Certainly processing power is not lacking: decoding a 50-megabit stream in full high definition takes a whole lot of CPU. Can’t such big processors handle the new menus? And it’s not a problem with the network either: if 8 megabits aren’t enough for the menus, I don’t know what it is.

While the disc menus are still acceptable, BD Live in particular is unbelievably slow. It takes time to download the content, and that’s surprising considering how limited the interface is. I don’t know exactly how it’s developed, but a website with a similar interface would be measured in the tens (or hundreds at most) of kilobytes. Why the same thing has to take so much through BD-J is beyond me. Perhaps the bytecode is huge? (Or maybe Java sucks? Hmm… tough one there.) And then again, why is navigating the finally-at-last-downloaded interface such a pain? You press a button, and it takes well over a second to register. Again: this also applied to the PS3, so it’s not exclusive to my relatively low-end player, which incidentally also has “Internet applications,” and they are just as slow. Probably it’s just local BD-J stuff.

Oh, and as a side note: my parents’ Blu-ray player has no internal memory. Mine has 64 MB — megabytes — of flash. On the other hand, my ebook reader has a solid gigabyte. Why not toss in a little bit more so that users are not forced to use USB thumb drives to access online content? Perhaps they want to make it harder for users to notice how slow BD-J is?

Such results do not surprise me in the slightest. I am a casual gamer, in that I usually buy a game every couple of months or so, and I usually purchase them from the UK, where they are much cheaper than in Italy. The reason I do that is that, since I never get games that have been just released, having to wait a week for the delivery is not a big deal. Savings versus instant gratification. (Disclaimer: that may not be the fact when GTA V comes out. Can’t help it.)

That is one of the reasons I prefer physical media: the price usually goes down on boxed discs, whereas digital downloads have a tendency to stay at the same price for much, much longer. Just compare the full games that you can now download through Xbox Live: they are invariably priced €29.99, even though the same games can now be found boxed and sealed for as low as €10.

Of course, physical goods can be lent and resold, which is what the big companies do not want you to do. Their line of business is 1-1: one user, one sale. If you sell your copy of Mirror’s Edge, DICE only makes profit once. If you rent your copy of Fable II to a friend, Lionhead only makes profit once. They don’t like this, and in a way it makes sense. However, perchance they should attempt to charge less on the game in the first place in order to have bigger sales. Game studios can and do make extra money on extra downloadable contents, after all. (And they sometimes manage to make money on that twice: many people who downloaded “The Lost And Damned” for GTA IV ended up buying the “Episodes from Liberty City” physical game, which carries both TLAD and “The Ballad of Gay Tony”.)

And while you can install games on an Xbox 360, it is not needed. It’s sure nice to have it load faster and quieter, but you can just run it from the disc itself if that’s your cup of tea. Considering that hard drives for the 360 are hard to find on their own, and usually come at insane prices, it’s not a bad thing. But when you download fifteen games at an average of 6 GB each, you start having a problem. (Yes, you can “hack” the hard drive bay, and I have done that. This is about “normal” consumers, though.)

Playstation 3 is not as kind: virtually all games require an installation, but at least you can swap the hard drive very, very easily. That’s a blessing, considering that some games require in excess of 10 GB, even when you have the disc.

These are the main reason for consumers — including me — not to feel like a digital download is worth such high pricetags. They have no resale value, and they have a higher cost in terms of space needed. Not to mention that it takes time to download gigabytes of data, and not everybody is on broadband; those who do, moreover, might have download caps.

The latter is also why I am stunned that Apple insists in saying that Blu-ray is not making its way onto Macs any time soon, and that it’s a “bag of hurt.” Do they really think that everybody is willing to spend money on purchasing/renting movies off the iTunes Store? That’s just not going to happen, for several reasons:

1. It’s just not available everywhere. Unless you are in the USA or in the UK, forget about video in the iTunes Store.
2. Even in those countries where it is available, bandwidth may be an issue.
3. Users only get 720p movies, whereas most — if not all — movies on Blu-ray are 1080p. That’s two and a quarter times the picture resolution, and well over five times the data size for a comparably smooth quality.
4. No resale value. Or, rather, no resale chance.
5. Other alternatives, at least in the US: Hulu, Netflix, etc.

Physical media is also very important for backup: a single-sided recordable DVD holds as much as 4.7 GB of data, and can be filled up in a matter of minutes. How long does uploading that much data when your upstream bandwidth is barely 50 KB/s?

Ultimately, whatever companies say, physical media is going to be around even in the age of cloud computing. Now let’s go and check for some bargains on videogames that support multiplayer, shall we?