Why can't we play games directly from the DVD?

One of the advantages of consoles vs PCs, is that you don't need to install the game. I have ~200 games, but I can have installed at some point only 5-10 of them, which is not so nice.
And then I wonder, DVD players in PCs are as fast as they are in consoles, so why games cannot be played directly, without using ~8 Gb of HD on installation files.
I know that HD is much faster than the DVD player, but if consoles are able to do it, why PC cannot.?

 

It is possible, but since hard drive space is dirt cheap and hard drives are a whole lot faster, the game developers don't bother to set the DVDs up that way. It's been about a decade (and CDs were still used back then) since anyone found it worthwhile not to install the whole thing. A 1TB hard drive costs less than $100 so even with very large games, there shouldn't be much of a problem for people gaming on desktops and even the laptop drives are pretty huge nowadays.

 

This is yet another reason that a good PC will play better than a console. They can do it, but get better performance if they don't. Most people are more concerned with performance than HDD space.

 

When SSD gets cheaper, loading times will be a thing of the past XD

 

You can play directly from anywhere if you want. You just have to make it ''portable'' and play directly from the exe . I have a bunch that I play directly from my USB key. But usually it is slower and there`s sometimes issues with vista.

 

Yeah, well I can play games without their discs on my PC :O

 

I do wonder how when GTA4 on the 360 fits on a DVD-9 disc, around 8gb of space, whereas the PC version comes with two discs and needs 15gb to install on the PC! That's a bit excessive!

There are many multiplatform games like GTA4 which run straight off the disc on the 360, even the models without an HDD. But as stated previously, hard drives on modern PCs are large and plentiful, so developers don't bother to take the extra effort to make the games run completely off the DVD. They couldn't with the 360 because not all models come with an HDD (although Kayne and Lynch: Dead Men is an exception which requires a HDD install).

All PS3's come with a HDD, which I believe is why some games have a mandatory installation like GTA4, lazy developers, in addition to the slower Blu-Ray drive in the PS3.

 

The PC version has much higher quality textures and probably a larger range of data that the 360 doesn't need to deal with. The 360 is a set architecture... you can run GTA on a number of different PC configurations, from a GeForce 7400 to a CrossFire 4890. If you don't have the data to support both of those customers, you're going to miss a number of sales. Given that most model simplifying algorithms take some serious CPU time as well as being patented and such, it's easier for game developers to just ship 3-4 copies of the same model, one for low detail, another for medium, another for high, another for extreme, each with their own set of textures... you get the idea. The XBox and PS3 don't need those options. The graphics quality is dictated by the system it's on, period.

 

The format for the discs for gaming systems also use all kinds of proprietary compression with the matching real-time decompression hardware and software built in to the system. I wouldn't be surpised if most console games decompressed would take 2-3 DVDs to fit.

 

I guess HD space is cheap. Still, there is no way I can put 200 games on it. I guess making them portable is the solution.

On the other hand according to sirmetman, it is a hardware issue of the PCs...

 

What happens when you lose the disk...?

 

Touche. Touche.

 

The PS3/360 versions are the PC version with the settings below 30, so yeah.