I downloaded the Bioshock Infinite 60-minute trial from the PlayStation Store. It contains the full game but the download was about 6 GB. I might buy the full game off PSN but I'm not going to pay full price (which is really just an unlock license for the trial) for a game with compressed video and textures.
Can anybody with a downloaded copy and disc copy tell me if PSN titles are compressed? Spec Ops: The Line, which I downloaded, looks down right awful at times.
Note: I'm aware the titles are probably losslessly compressed (eg: (7)zip, gzip, etc) and then extracted, but I'm referring to lossy compression made to the game's resources.
Best Answer
You've got your definitions of "compressed" crossed. I'm almost certain the games are compressed in some way so that the PSN can send as little data as possible, but these would be lossless compression methods (almost everything sent via the net is compressed in some way or another, non-media files are almost always compressed losslessly). And at the same time, in-game assets like graphics, video and music are compressed because the raw files from which they're made are far far too large to fit on even blu ray disks (or if they could, load times would be beyond unbearable).
As for the question of quality, no, digitally downloaded games do not differ in quality whatsoever. The graphics, audio and video that you'll see on a downloaded title are identical to what you'd see on a disc. There is no quality related reason to prefer digital or physical media releases for PS3 games. I own several dozen digital PS3 games now and there's no noteworthy differences (besides the loading speeds, which are superior, and the storage requirements).