If L. S. made the game to run from the DVD with minimal registration file and HD usage it shall be an unprecedented product, and that might double its sales.
If you're interested, go check out the sales for Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance on PC. The 2nd week after the game was out, the price dropped by half.
Still, each time I walk in the stores, I still see the 4 copies of the game, untouched. Why? Because it is on DVD. The surest way to worsen <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/riftrunner.gif" alt="" />'s sales, is to publish a DVD. Most people won't upgrade their computers because of one game, so don't expect people buy a DVD-player with RiftRunner.
The Executable code MUST be in RAM.
The graphical background on which you shall be able to zoom in/ out MUST be in RAM, what difference does it make to load it from the DVD or the Hard Disk except wasted media and redundancy?
The DVD shall be native to play sound tracks and movie clips at highest quality per data-memory-media cost.
You never run code from a hard disk or a cd directly, so the issue here is data streaming not running code. Streaming the audio music track data from DVD to sound card directly saves CPU time by the advanced architectures available today.
Streaming the video movie clip directly to the graphics card too would be fantastic when it is compressed, for example by MPEG3 or whatever is compatible.
Metal Gear was never at the same rank of <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/div.gif" alt="" /> to make a comparison and in my opinion it would never sell good even if they printed it on a gold dish.
I think that <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/riftrunner.gif" alt="" /> and the following Divinity II may be the best reason to push the market to upgrade.
Cheers.
