Installation has always been a part of the game when it comes to PC gaming. When ever you get a new PC game home and begin installation, the worst part are the wait and the hope that the installation goes okay without any complications. For PS3 owners, installation has become a part of their lives as well, something I’m sure a lot of console gamers never saw coming.
Some detective work was done by MTV to try and figure out why it is that some key PS3 titles require installation while others do not. The answer basically comes down to read speeds. While DVD drives on the market today can read at several different speeds, Blu-ray drives currently only have one drive speed. This problem however doesn’t exist with the hard drive, so developers drop some of the game’s data onto the hard drive to decrease load times. By making you wait before you can play, you won’t have to wait so much while you’re actually playing.
There are of course other ways of getting around the low read speeds of the Blu-ray drive without having to install, but they require a great deal of effort on the part of the developers, which is why you see many of them taking the easy way out. Hopefully this installation game won’t last too long as the PS3’s hard drive can only store so much, especially when the installations are big as 5GB.
