Why PS3 games need an install

The Official Playstation Magazine (August issue) has the reasoning as to why a certain amount of Playstation 3 games require an install. Its because its quicker to read the game data from the hard drive rather than the Blu-Ray disc. This also means shorter loading times during gameplay.

Chief software architect at Eutechnyx, Dr Andrew Perella says:

“The biggest benefit of loading data from hard drive as opposed to Blue-ray is that the seek times are lower. Games that make use of lot of user customisations are hit hard by this as the developer cannot know ahead of time what will need to be loaded”

I bet your now thinking ‘does that mean every game will be installed to the hard drive’, the answer is no. Look at Call of Duty 4 and Uncharted Drake’s Fortune, they didn’t require an install and ran fantastically well.

Game developers are working around this by taking a more pro-active approach to Blu-Ray’s data transfer technology. Some are working with streaming methods that load data while your playing, others are duplicating frequent required data around the disc so it can be located and loaded up faster.

Pete Hines of Bethesda, the vice president of public relations and marketing says:

“we get around it by doing caching to the hard drive behind the scenes. And yes, we do have more than one copy of data on the disc in different locations to make the streaming process faster.”

It is understood that in the future, game installs for the Playstation 3 will be a thing of the past.