Skillset Blog

Big news today, if you like to compare media storage capabilities - Toshiba has announced that it is to halt production of HD-DVD’s leaving Sony’s Blu-Ray discs the whole of the market to play in.

I don’t think this is massive news for the games industry, as it has been typified for many years as a space with competing formats of hardware and software, and developers have become adept at releasing their games across more than one platform. With neither main console, or PC games pinning their standards to the HD-DVD cause it will have little impact other than to highlight the PS3’s position as the best value Blu-Ray player available.

The real challenge, IMHO, is to come from digital downloads. The games industry understands boxed products, but increasingly the competition for a particular storage format is not between different types of disc but between discs and the internet.

Whilst Blu-Ray offers game developers huge scope for creating vast, ultra realistic environments and millions of assets for use in game, it is still bound by traditional retail models - digital downloads offer the games industry new opportunites to reach consumers that will need to be mastered.

Its another management skills issue folks, and one that will carry on long after we’ve stopped using discs to store things on and everything is piped directly into our brains - how can we best exploit our content/product/service/whatever using the technology available to us.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Games. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but we reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.