By the end of this year, Sony plans to release the first Blu-ray Disc that will include a full PS3 videogame and a movie on a single disc.
Per Video Business, Sony is aggressively looking to utilize the added storage capacity a Blu-ray Disc has over an Xbox 360 Disc or Wii Disc. With Blu-ray able to hold 50GB, an Xbox 360 disc pales in comparison at 9GB and Wii substantially less than that.
We’ve seen an early version of this idea already when Midway released a collector’s edition of John Woo’s Strangehold for PS3. That set included Hard Boiled on a separate Blu-ray Disc. To date, purchasing Strangehold is the only way to get Hard Boiled in 1080p on Blu-ray.
A perfect opportunity to test this single-disc initiative would have been on Sony’s own Ghostbusters. The game is being published by Atari and film by Sony for a simultaneous release on June 16. Since we already know these two titles will be released separately, these new game/movie hybrid discs aren’t likely to appear until year’s end.
“We are actively pushing, and the way that we see the future is that the movie and the game are placed on the same disc,” said John Koller, director of hardware marketing for the PS3. “There are a lot of developers who say, we have this game based on a movie, wouldn’t it be great to marry these concepts? We will definitely see this stuff this year.”
Ironically this move by Sony mirrors the concept TheHDRoom was founded upon: the marriage of games and movies/TV as one all-encompassing entertainment arena. It will certainly be interesting to see what Sony ends up charging for a hybrid disc.
