So will Portal 2 also use PCM?

[Vonje]

Every Valve title have been using standard PCM audio. MP3 has been used, but only for soundtracks. The games could have been so much smaller if the sound was compressed some way. Vorbis would be a good choice since it's free, it's hard to hear a difference, and the fact that it can reduce some sounds to be ten times as small! Many games use Vorbis, even Minecraft.

[wade]

This seems like the kind of oddly specific question we won't have an answer for until it's released. That said the file size of most games isn't that extreme, and even though I can't tell the difference between lossless and lossy most of the time either I think it's nicer to have higher quality audio to start with.

[hahahehe]

The answer is simple.

If Valve released a game with lossy audio there would be a torrent of complaints from the die hard gamers, quickly followed by boycotts of valve products and finally the real hardcore fans would prolly stalk Gabe....

Its a quality issue, lossy audio would be seen as bad quality, even if there is no noticeable difference.

[XF3DeX]

http://store.steampowered.com/news/?feed=steam_blog

Steam chat with SILK is now also automatically available for all games that take advantage of the Steamworks Voice API. Valve's own Portal 2, set to release in mid-April, uses this newly updated system to enable voice chat in its cooperative gameplay mode.

[wade]

That's completely unrelated, but still interesting. Thanks for the link.

[Vonje]

The answer is simple.

If Valve released a game with lossy audio there would be a torrent of complaints from the die hard gamers, quickly followed by boycotts of valve products and finally the real hardcore fans would prolly stalk Gabe....

Its a quality issue, lossy audio would be seen as bad quality, even if there is no noticeable difference.

Well there's always lossless compression. FLAC (http://flac.sourceforge.net/) is also free to use like Vorbis (http://www.vorbis.com/), but there's no excuse for quality loss here.