How Mandatory Game Installations Will Work On PS4

[BajiRav]

 http://kotaku.com/how-mandatory-game-installations-will-work-on-ps4-1462283797

 

Call it installation or call it caching, but the bottom line is that you will have to save large chunks of PlayStation 4 games to the system's hard drive. It's not an option. It's mandatory on Sony's next-gen system. Today, at a stylish waterfront hotel in New York City that's been taken over by Sony for all things PS4, the system's lead architect, Mark Cerny, explained just how these requirements work.

If you are playing a disc-based game, the system will begin caching the disc when you put it in the console and get ready to play. The game is saving part of itself to the system's hard drive. The amount of data that has to be saved before you can start will vary per title.

Cerny said that for the launch game he directed, Knack, users should only have to wait 10s of seconds to play the game. After that, as you play, the game will stream more content to the console's 500GB hard drive. Knack will use 37GB of space overall, as noted on the game's box. Obviously, it won't take many games to fill the console's hard drive.

Cached/installed game data will stay on the hard drive until the user deletes it. Cerny said that there had been some internal discussions at Sony about having the PS4 auto-delete installed data from games that players hadn't used in a while. They decided against it, figuring that gamers would never want to feel "blindsided" and would prefer to make their data management decisions manually. Probably a good choice!1

The disc installation is required on PS4 because the console is not designed to read games off of discs. It's not a PlayStation issue. It's a physics issue. The machine may have a Blu-Ray drive that's about three times faster than the PS3 with about six times as much memory, but it's still more expedient for it to read data from its own hard drive. Cerny said his team had heard too many complaints from current-gen developers about having to wait to load in new levels of games. Putting the data on the readily-accessible hard drive alleviates that.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft's Xbox One requires installation from Blu-Ray, too, and only runs games off the hard drive.

If a PS4 user decides to download a game, they will have to wait longer to play. Cerny couldn't provide as narrow an estimate on how long a player who decided to download Knack would have to wait. That depends in large part on a user's Internet connection speed. Ideally, he said, they wouldn't have to wait more than an hour before beginning to play the partially downloaded games. Other games may be set up differently, allowing users to start playing them sooner or requiring them to wait longer. With these kinds of download speeds and requirements, players may want to queue their PS4 downloads long before they want to start gaming or download in the background while doing something else. Or just drive to the store and get a disc.

We'll have much more about the PS4 in the coming days as well as a review of the system at 9am ET, on Wednesday, November 13.

 

 

This is pretty stupid of Sony to equate cache and installation. :s Anything to one-up Microsoft I guess.

 

So much for Yoshida saying "there is no mandatory installs" on PS4. I think AB had started a thread on it.

[trooper11]

So caching is the exact same thing as installing to the drive, it just allows you to start playing before its completely installed. I think the X1 has a similar system in place.

I was thinking that the cache would delete itself as soon as you stopped playing, but since it remains even after your done, then its not a method meant to try and help the storage issue, just a way to get the user into a game quicker.

Its interesting that both Sony and MS have decided that you cannot play a game from the disc. They both seem pretty confident that it simply would not work well if they would design their system to not have the option to play from the disc directly. I guess the bluray read speeds just couldn't cut it.

[fusi0n]

NES still the best system ever.

[vcfan]

confusing message, bad pr, 180

am I doing this right?

[Brian M. Veteran]

I have no problem with mandatory installs. People who have lots of games will upgrade their drives anyway, so space isn't an issue.

What sucks is the long wait - there's nothing worse than buying a game, putting it in, and then waiting a good 20-30 minutes for it to install. If I can play whilst it's installing after a little while, I don't really care about it.

[Wapoz]

confusing message, bad pr, 180

am I doing this right?

 

Completely off topic, but are you Eyvn from Dragon Nest?  Your style of writing and sarcasm is similar to him, he even uses the same avatar lol.

[+virtorio MVC]

I have no problem with consoles caching game data, but I do think it should auto remove data that hasn't been used in a while if it's preventing a game from running (because there's not enough disk space).

 

We're at a point where these systems should manage this data automatically,

[Showan]

Seems inconvenient...

 

I know this is the Sony thread (not trying to start any wars or flame)... But it seems Microsoft also knew of these limitations as well, and that's why ALL games would have been digital, to get your games installed and playing quicker.

 

Even if you would have went to a friends house, you could of brought the game disc with you, it installs and you are gaming much quicker.

[firey]

Seems inconvenient...

 

I know this is the Sony thread (not trying to start any wars or flame)... But it seems Microsoft also knew of these limitations as well, and that's why ALL games would have been digital, to get your games installed and playing quicker.

 

Even if you would have went to a friends house, you could of brought the game disc with you, it installs and you are gaming much quicker.

Thing is though.. all 6x blu ray drives will read at more or less the same speed, and all stock hdds will read/write around the same speed.  However internet connections vary from house to house, even identical connections vary.  By going digital play times will vary by a large amount, ranging from minutes to days depending.   So for some people installed and playing is significantly faster if done physically vs. digitally. 

[firey]

I have no problem with consoles caching game data, but I do think it should auto remove data that hasn't been used in a while if it's preventing a game from running (because there's not enough disk space).

 

We're at a point where these systems should manage this data automatically,

Oh for sure, but guaranteed there will be people saying: "I installed KZ:SF last year at launch, and haven't played it for 6 months, went to play today and had to install again! WTF ZOMG!"

[Blackhearted]

Seems inconvenient...

 

I know this is the Sony thread (not trying to start any wars or flame)... But it seems Microsoft also knew of these limitations as well, and that's why ALL games would have been digital, to get your games installed and playing quicker.

 

Even if you would have went to a friends house, you could of brought the game disc with you, it installs and you are gaming much quicker.

 

Unless your internet connection is atleast a few hundred megabits/sec, All digital would not come anywhere close to letting you play quicker.

[George P Global Moderator]

I have no problem with mandatory installs. People who have lots of games will upgrade their drives anyway, so space isn't an issue.

What sucks is the long wait - there's nothing worse than buying a game, putting it in, and then waiting a good 20-30 minutes for it to install. If I can play whilst it's installing after a little while, I don't really care about it.

 

Welcome to PC gaming..... :P

[RageOfFury]

I'm picking up one of these and will be installing it the moment I get my PS4

 

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178340&Tpk=ST1000LM014

[LittleNeutrino Veteran]

the main reason for the cache/ installation of games on a console is the data read bottleneck on a disk. The problem is there is so much information that needs to be read so that the game can render the graphics that it cannot read it fast enough from the disk. so it puts it across two devices (the disc and the HDD) so it can read from two places at once. thus reducing the bottleneck.

 

This is the exact same problem that is seen with GTAV for download only users. They get a lot of pop-in from buildings and foliage because the hard drive cannot give it the information it needs fast enough.

[vcfan]

Completely off topic, but are you Eyvn from Dragon Nest?  Your style of writing and sarcasm is similar to him, he even uses the same avatar lol.

nope. don't even know what dragon nest is. must be a fellow canucks fan :)

[freak180]

This is their plan to get us to buy downloads. That way we can play right away while its downloading...what do you guys think?

[Brian M. Veteran]

I'm picking up one of these and will be installing it the moment I get my PS4

 

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178340&Tpk=ST1000LM014

Is it worth going for a Hybrid drive?

I have a 500GB drive in my PS3 which is far too small, but I haven't noticed any speed issues and I doubt the 8GB will make much difference. I was planning on suffering the 500GB for now and putting in a Spinpoint M9T when it's available.

[Atomic Wanderer Chicken]

What is the issue here, I had to install Gran Turismo 5 and it works faster than reading off a disc. The same as Gran Turismo PSP, installing it makes everything load faster. Another click bait and inflame article

[BajiRav]

What is the issue here, I had to install Gran Turismo 5 and it works faster than reading off a disc. The same as Gran Turismo PSP, installing it makes everything load faster. Another click bait and inflame article

There is no baiting here. Sony had confusing messaging on game installs. This finally makes it clear.

[trooper11]

What is the issue here, I had to install Gran Turismo 5 and it works faster than reading off a disc. The same as Gran Turismo PSP, installing it makes everything load faster. Another click bait and inflame article

Umm, are you still smarting over that other thread that is totally unrelated to this one?

What about the topic was unfair or flame bait?

We didn't know how installs would work and now we do. There was a question about what caching meant. Some thought it meant that space would be used temporarily and removed after you were done playing.

Of course installing is better, who said it wasn't? The only downside is the lack of space for these large games, but I'm happy to work around that for the performance.

[soniqstylz]

*cough*

 

http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2013/10/30/shuhei-yoshida-further-discusses-ps4-game-installs-suggests-data-will-stay-on-your-hdd-after-playing-a-game/

[soniqstylz]

This is their plan to get us to buy downloads. That way we can play right away while its downloading...what do you guys think?

 

Read the OP.  Cerny says you can start playing Knack after about a 10-second load.  Downloading, it could take an hour before you can start playing.  And from the guy who got his X1 early, it took 20 minutes installing CoD from disc (until it got to 51%), still much faster than downloading.

[spacer]

NES still the best system ever.

SNES!

[freak180]

Read the OP.  Cerny says you can start playing Knack after about a 10-second load.  Downloading, it could take an hour before you can start playing.  And from the guy who got his X1 early, it took 20 minutes installing CoD from disc (until it got to 51%), still much faster than downloading.

WTF living under a rock? You only have to download a small percentage before you can play the game.

[Atomic Wanderer Chicken]

I don't know how a 500gb HDD will cope with 10 plus games that need to install lots of GBs of data. If you have 10 games that need to install 20gb on the hdd, (which is probably understated) then that's 200gb. 1 terabyte HDD should have been standard in the PS4