PS3 details (60 GB HDD, Worldwide Launch, etc)

[Paco]

Blu-Ray Only

March 14, 2006 - At its PlayStation Business Briefing 2006 in Japan, Sony announced its production plans for BD-ROM discs (Blu-ray). Firstly, all PlayStation 3 games will ship on Blu-ray to help prevent piracy. In other words, no "cheap" DVD releases; Blu-ray only. Of course, it'll still play PS2 and movies on DVD, but all PS3 releases will be on Blu-ray.

The company expects initial BD-ROM production to reach 2.5 million in Japan and Europe and 5 million in the US.

60 GB HDD standard

As part of the PlayStation Business Brief today in Tokyo, Ken Kutaragi confirmed that the PlayStation 3 will require a hard drive peripheral for games. Developers are being told to create games with the assumption that a hard disk will be present.

"The hardware was developed with the hard disk in mind," Kutaragi said.

Earlier, we mistakenly reported that Sony would including the hard disk with the PS3 right out of the box. Kutaragi actually stopped short of confirming this, leaving it as an area of speculation for now. He did state that Sony hopes to avoid a situation where some systems have the drive and others don't (Kutaragi didn't mention Xbox 360, but he was probably thinking it).

It's live!...?

At the PlayStation Business Briefing 2006, Ken Kutaragi has just added another infamous quote to his belt, this time stating that PS3 games are "live" and that the PS3 concept is "4D".

He claims that games have gone from 8-bit to 16-bit planes, to the "space" that you saw on the PS1/PS2, and now PS3 will be "live".