Sounds kinda silly but… do PS3 games need to be installed to play? I swear I’ve heard “something” about installing games on the PS3’s harddrive.
The answer is… it depends. Some games do need to be installed while other don’t. I’m sure there’s a mention on the box or in the instruction booklet somewhere of which games do.
I was going to say no, but it sort of depends on the game.
- Most games run off the game disc, more or less. (Some might have patches, which would go to the hard drive.)
- Games you buy via the PlayStation Network (PSN) are downloaded and installed on the system’s hard drive.
- Some disc-based or downloaded games have extra downloadable content (DLC) for free or purchase over the PSN, which is installed on the hard drive.
Rock Band 2 runs off the disc, but you can get extra music in a lot of ways, all of which installs to the hard drive. (I suspect even the songs on the Rock Band 2 disc install onto the hard drive as well.) This includes “ripping” the songs off the original Rock Band game disc, the purchaseable “track pack” discs, songs purchased via the PSN store, and songs obtained via free song codes that you enter into your system.
Does that clarify matters?
Most games of note require mandatory installs to operate.
Most games don’t require much in the way of hard drive space. I suspect the ones that do require hard drive space do so for performance reasons; reading data off the hard drive will be faster than from the Blu-Ray drive.
I had a baseball game (MLB 07 or something) that required like 5GB or something crazy. I’ve uninstalled it, with all my media files 5GB is just too precious for one baseball game.
If you’re running out of hard drive space on your PS3 you either need to splurge 70 bucks and pick up a new hard drive or stream your media from your PC using PS3 Media Server.
I use my PS3 for media watching more than gaming, but I don’t have one gig of hard drive space used on media. It’s all stored on my PC and streamed on demand to the PS3.
FYI, the latest Playstation magazine has a short article on how to install, on your own, a new larger internal hard drive.
Heck, the manual for the PS3 Slim (I finally got myself a PS3 on Saturday as the price point and features finally converged at a point that I would buy) has directions for how to install a new hard drive. If I need to, I’ll stick a 1.5 TB drive in there, not that I can figure out how I could get that much on a hard drive.
If a disc-based game does install, it’s about as transparent as installing software under Mac OS X. You just tell the computer to do its thing and a couple minutes later your game is ready to play.
I thought laptop HDs maxed out at 500gb. Not the case?
Oh, is it 2.5"? Well, then, 500 gigs. As I said, I doubt I’d have to do it any time soon.