High Price of PS3 and Disk Space

It is believed that the high price of the PS3 is going to be because of the Blu-ray Drive. Sony says that next generation games will need the space and it is the most requested feature from developers. Then Microsoft says that DVD will be adequate and not until the end of this generation before games begin to require more than 9GB of space.

I think both points here are valid and correct as Sony is looking at this from a Japanese perspective and Microsoft is looking at this from a western perspective. Most Japanese games will have ok game graphics and then very high quality pre-rendered cinematics which require a lot of space on disk. Western games have abandoned this formula because game graphics are now good enough that a transition from realtime to pre-rendered isn't necessary and most western games use very little pre-rendered sequences making western games very space efficient. So I think Microsoft was right to stick with DVD, but I wonder if in five years time wither Japanese developers will also abandon pre-rendered sequences.