At the QuakeCon 2008 keynote, John Carmack, game designer and co-founder of id software, shared information on their upcoming first person shooter titled Rage. Carmack commented on a storage problem related to Microsoft's XBOX 360 platform.

Carmark believes that compressing Rage textures such that the game data fits on to two XBOX 360 DVDs would result in loss of visual quality. He added that including a third disc would shoot up the royalties that id would need to pay Microsoft. Carmack is therefore seeking a concession on the royalties from Microsoft, otherwise the Xbox 360 version of Rage could be a lesser port, he stated.One of the key features of the Tech 5 engine used to power Rage is the use of so-called "megatextures" -- huge textures that bring in detail while allowing the polygon count of a 3d-surface to be kept low. These large textures need greater space to store. It is due to this that Carmack is facing storage problems on the Xbox 360.
On the other hand Sony's PS3 might get an upper hand with its Blu-ray drive. The game Rage will also be available on multiple DVDs and Blu-ray discs for the PC and Mac platforms.

Now all eyes are on Microsoft to how this problem would be addressed. Despite of the fact that compression technologies over optical media have taken us far, DVD media seems to have hit a wall.

While you are here, check out Rage's extended trailer.