Why do people defend installs?
PC installs are irritating as hell. Especially if they involve 'restart windows' as a step.
But, it's all just a trade-off for larger games.
PC games started needing installs when the size of programs exceeded the capacity of the medium.
Floppy disk based games had installs when games got beyond a single floppy.
CD based games often didn't have installers until much later.
Wing commander 3 came on 4 CD's, and didn't require serious installation. It had it as an option, but even that amounted to installing 50 Megabytes of the most frequently used data, out of about 2 gigabytes total.
2 years later, suddenly the majority of CD based games have installers.
Actually, half of the problem is windows, but the other, is that companies were starting to try and squash 800 megabytes of game data onto a 650 megabyte CD.
Whatever the reason is that it's nessesary on a PS3 to begin with, it's suggestive of strained storage technology.
In other words, Blu-ray isn't as impressive in practice as it sounds on paper.
PC installs are irritating as hell. Especially if they involve 'restart windows' as a step.
But, it's all just a trade-off for larger games.
PC games started needing installs when the size of programs exceeded the capacity of the medium.
Floppy disk based games had installs when games got beyond a single floppy.
CD based games often didn't have installers until much later.
Wing commander 3 came on 4 CD's, and didn't require serious installation. It had it as an option, but even that amounted to installing 50 Megabytes of the most frequently used data, out of about 2 gigabytes total.
2 years later, suddenly the majority of CD based games have installers.
Actually, half of the problem is windows, but the other, is that companies were starting to try and squash 800 megabytes of game data onto a 650 megabyte CD.
Whatever the reason is that it's nessesary on a PS3 to begin with, it's suggestive of strained storage technology.
In other words, Blu-ray isn't as impressive in practice as it sounds on paper.