The First Morning Ends

"But players will pay for it," another reporter said, closing his notebook. "Spend the money for two ordinary games and get four discs' worth of content, and content this exquisite at that. With this kind of dimensional strike, how are other RPG developers supposed to answer?"

"Sony's going to have trouble," the editor from Computer Gaming World cut in. "Most of PlayStation's main titles right now keep their capacity within six hundred megabytes. Sony deliberately downplayed the concept of game capacity in its marketing and focused on polygon-processing power. Now Square has directly raised the capacity threshold to four times that."

"Several of Sega's major first-party titles used two CDs at most," a colleague added. "With this move, Square hasn't just crushed Sony—even Sega's own games have been outdone in terms of content volume."

"That's where Sega is clever," the analyst said, stopping his pen. "They tolerate third parties surpassing them in capacity, and even provide technical support. That sends a signal to every developer: on Jupiter, your ambition won't be limited by the hardware."

Sakaguchi Hironobu gave a slight bow and walked off the stage.

The morning main-stage press conference ended there.

The noon sunlight in Los Angeles shone straight onto the glass curtain walls of the convention center.

The entire morning press conference schedule had come to an end.

Reporters from various media outlets packed up their camera bags and recording equipment, moving with the flow of people toward the exits.

This year, the IDSA organizing committee had stretched out the press conference schedule, so the major manufacturers' events were no longer all crammed into the same day.

Media workers finally had room to breathe.

The first E3 in May of last year had been a physical endurance test for every attendee.

Press conferences came one after another,