Speaking in an interview with Eurogamer, Maguire defended Sony, dismissing claims that they are forcing consumers to adopt the Blu-Ray format in order to experience the next-gen PlayStation.
"Blu-Ray is really important for the games side of our business because what it does is it give us the ability to have 50Gb of information actually on the disc," said Maguire.
"With PlayStation 3 you're looking at a Cell chip that has immense computing power. That means you're going to need a huge amount of storage as well - we really need that Blu-Ray disc because what we don't want to be doing is swapping discs half way through loading. It's really important to us."
It's questionable whether or not 50GB is really necessary in regards to game assets. The benefit the extra storage gives is the ability to include lengthy high definition pre-rendered cutscenes, rather than generating sequences using the in-game engine.
Maguire also emphasised that high definition is the future, using Sky's roll out of HD in time for the World Cup as an example, also stating that not much HD content is currently available; something that the PlayStation 3 will fix.
"The reality is there's not very much High Definition content at the moment, and in a way PlayStation 3 is going to legitimise the whole of the High Definition experience for people," said Maguire, apparently oblivious to the HD gaming experience already available on the Xbox 360.
At £425 the PlayStation 3 is undeniably great value when factoring in the cost of a standalone Blu-Ray player, but the biggest difference between it and the Xbox 360 is that Microsoft is giving gamers the opportunity to adopt an HD movie format. Sony, on the other hand, has said to consumers that it's Blu-Ray or nothing. Whether or not this will hurt PlayStation 3 sales remains to be seen, but with hardware sales in 2006 likely to match production rates, it won't be until next year that we see the full picture.
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