Phil Harrison On The Reason For Blue-ray

Sony’s Phil Harrison claims the Blue-ray player included with the PS3 is primarily for the games.

In an interview with Gamepro, Phil Harrison made waves with a statement that the Blue-ray player in the upcoming PS3 was purely a game support decision. “There’s this sort of misunderstanding that the Blu-ray disc player for movies is somehow burdening the console with unnecessary cost,” said Harrison. “That is completely not true. We put our Blu-ray disc functionality in the console purely from a game design point of view.”

“Once we had that storage capacity on Blu-ray disc, adding the movie playback functionality was extremely cost-effective, [the cost] is actually non-existent,” he said. Meaning that once you’ve swallowed the cost for games, it doesn’t cost anything more to support movies too.

“So games like Resistance which, as a launch title, is up to 20-something gigabytes already. And that’s day one – think about four years, six years from now. We’ll be pushing the 50 gigabyte limit with dual-layer Blu-ray very quickly,” he claimed. “So we absolutely need it as game designers, and in that regard, the consumer is getting the movie functionality effectively for free.”

Sony’s efforts to build a new context around the Blue-ray player will likely continue until well after launch on November 17th.