So there you go: you can either install game assets on the hard drive or by place redundant game data around the disc. The problem in both of these solutions is that one of the advantages of Blu-ray become less compelling. Why bother with a large Blu-ray disc when you're putting that data on the hard drive before you play anyway? You could have simply put that extra information on a DVD and then moved it onto the hard drive The same can be said about the redundancy approach: why not just use a standard DVD and have it load quickly in the first place instead of doubling or tripling up your data on a slower but larger disc?
The Blu-ray drive is useful for movies, of course, but for gaming, Blu-ray doesn't look like it's the best choice until faster drives are released. There is every possibility of a future PS3 revision with a faster Blu-ray drive, but that won't help current PS3 owners. Blu-ray may be the future for storage that's both large and fast, but right now it seems shoe-horned into gaming applications. It seems like developers may actually do better by shipping some of their PS3 games on DVDs. Games will load faster and manufacturers will save money on the discs. Would Sony allow it?