Loading ...According to CVG, Microsoft strongly believes that ‘digital media’, and not Blu-Ray, is the “future of home entertainment”. Ever since HD DVD gave up and backed out of the ‘next-gen’ format, there have always been rumors of Microsoft potentially releasing a Blu-Ray drive add-on. The Blu-Ray drive would help to increase its media playback capabilities, as well as possibily creating games using the Blu-Ray discs for more space to work around, thereby playing on the same field as the PlayStation 3.
However, it seems no matter how much people talk about how Xbox 360 needs a Blu-Ray drive, Microsoft will not allow it and instead, continue with their ways of stating how digital media will take over physical media. 
Recent comments from game developers, including Capcom, have stated that they’ve had to cut content out from Xbox 360 versions of their games (including Lost Planet 2) because of the size restrictions of the aging DVD format.
Director of Xbox and Entertainment at Microsoft Stephen Gill told CVG,”We have no plans to adopt [a] Blu-Ray drive for the Xbox 360. In fact, the future of home entertainment started last autumn when Xbox 360 became the first and only console to offer instant-on 1080p streaming HD movies.”
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer left many guessing earlier on in the week, when he hinted that there will be revised models of the Xbox 360 coming “in the future”. So what do you guys think these ‘revised’ Xbox 360 models will include? Blu-Ray? Natal?
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If HD-DVD would have succeeded, Microsoft would be singing a different tune. The truth of the matter is, Blu-ray is a Mass storage media before anything else. Blu-ray allows the consumer to save hard drive space and save money.
A digital HD movie download ranges from $9.99 to $19.99 on XBox and PS3. The same movie on Blu-ray ranges from $9.99 to $21.99. The download is only good for 1 day. The Blu-ray is good forever. You do the math.
Microsoft is bitter about the loss of HD-DVD. Their negative comments towards Blu-ray are expected.
Digital distribution is good, but it does have its limits, especially in areas with caps on their monthly internet downloads.
PS3 games can already fill up a Blu-Ray disk. Pretty soon games will probably be coming on two or three Blu-Rays. Someone needs to tell Microsoft that NOBODY wants to be swapping 10-15 DVDs, or downloading and saving over 100GB of data. 2010 internet bandwidths and console hard-disks just aren’t up to it.
High capacity disks will still be necessary for this, and probably the next video-games generation.
Digital distribution is the future. Microsoft never really supported HD-DVD, Toshiba having to make an external add-on rather than a built in HD-DVD drive is one of the main reasons the media failed. Blu Ray is slow and not ideal for gaming. It appears the only reason games are filling up Blu Ray discs is due to developer inefficiency. It is amazing to me how people praise the BR disc size yet those same games that are just “too big” for a standard DVD seem to fit just fine without any hinderance to graphics or performance. Games like Oblivion, Fallout3, Metal Gear, FF13, and so on are just now starting to push to limits of DVD storage capacity. Sony itself is also striving for online distribution of content, look at PSN and the PSP Go. Online is the future as internet become cheaper and faster along with 500GB HDD becoming dirt cheap.
“It appears the only reason games are filling up Blu Ray discs is due to developer inefficiency. It is amazing to me how people praise the BR disc size yet those same games that are just “too big” for a standard DVD seem to fit just fine without any hinderance to graphics or performance. Games like Oblivion, Fallout3, Metal Gear, FF13, and so on are just now starting to push to limits of DVD storage capacity.”
Firstly, I agree with you completely that MS’ patrionage of HD DVD was no more than a fillip. But as far as game storage goes, the writing is already on the wall for DVD. More and more studios are starting to acknowledge they’re hitting the limits of DVD. Contrary to “just starting to push the limits of DVD storage capacity”, Metal Gear was released almost two years ago and although it is FMV heavy, it still seems unlikely that it would have been possible to fit even a trimmed-down game onto the 360s 6.5GB DVD format. Final Fantasy XIII uses three DVDs on the 360, a single Blu-Ray on the PS3, and the 360 version still has noticably inferior graphics (although again that is an FMV intensive game). We’ve already seen games like Oblivion, Star Ocean, Infinite Undiscovery etc use multiple discs, and more recently Forza 3 (which isn’t open to accusations of being FMV reliant or lazily programmed).
It’s clear that the limitations of DVD for game distribution are starting to be felt, and it’s rather ironic that the console which most needs digital distribution to make up for those DVD limitations is the one that’s least well equipped to utilise them, and will be until Microsoft drop their tactic of scalping their customers for overpriced proprietary hard discs sold at three or four times their market value.
Microsoft needs to wake up and smell the coffee. Blu-ray is the here and now and will be for some time… wide scale adoption of digital media downloads (or streaming) of 1080p True-HD movies + all the bonus material isn’t going to happen for years. The only way that digital media will become viable for HD content (at the same quality as Blu-ray media, not the ultra compressed digital junk they’re trying to push today) is when the majority of people have fibre to their door and ISPs offer low cost internet subscriptions with an unlimited quota.
From a purely technical perspective, HD-DVD failed as a media distribution format because it could not compete with Blu-ray on capacity, however in many other ways HD-DVD was a superior format to Blu-ray… but that ship has sailed. Microsoft will need to address the capacity shortcoming of the Xbox platform in their next generation console. If they do not, they risk being surpassed by their rivals. Customers don’t take too kindly to being prompted to change DVDs mid-game (that’s so 1998) and likewise customers are not going to want to download 20+GB of content on today’s slow/limited internet connections.
Microsoft could have built HD-DVD into the Xbox 360 but they didn’t because they wanted to beat Sony’s PS3 to market with their own next-gen console. Including HD-DVD would have made Xbox 360 more expensive and delayed the product launch so they decided to stick with DVD. This I believe was a costly mistake for Microsoft who at the time didn’t have the foresight to see that there actually was a growing market and interest for a converged media/gaming device.
Seems like this bitter pill is still leaving a sour taste in Microsoft’s mouth, but their continued denial of reality isn’t going to sweeten their palate.
I’m giving up with XBOX, In the long run the PS3 is cheaper. No yearly cost to be online and play online (unlike XBOX Live), Sony just came out with a motion device like the Wii and it has Blue Ray to boot. Microsoft is sold on Cloud computing and this is their tactic in the gaming world. I wonder what is going to happen when ISP’s start limiting bandwidth unless you pay. Unlimited downloading will be going away in the next year or 2. Not to mention many rural areas don’t have that option already.
Just put in a blasted blueray interface in the stupid machine. that’s all there is to it. i’d like to have only one device that plays dvd’s, games, and blueray all in one. saves money and space. start thinking smart and, for just this one time, follow someone elses lead. it’s like the apple iphone w/o flash player, great device but lacks in that one function which has put a small dent in the amount of sells that they have recieved. add blueray and increase your overall sells, simple as that. i work at wal-mart as a cashier and i see more and more blueray dvd/players go through my line each week. blueray is getting more and more popular because you can stick more data on the disk itself and have less disks. add blueray and make an even larger group of people happier
Xbox 360 doesn’t need blu ray honestly a lot of the ps3 third party games were made on the xbox 360 and then ported to the ps3 and that gives xbox the edge because it would take too much time to program and use the hardware capabilities and so almost all third party games are superior graphically on the xbox 360 the xbox offers a better gpu as well and for the capacity issue with regular DVDs why don’t programmers program the base features on the DVD and then let is decide and download the featues that we want that would be on the ps3 version
MS would love to rape us on over priced digital content. This claim now that they always envisioned all digital media is BS and just damage control. It proves they made a mistake supporting HD DVD and now they are trying to cover it up to save face after losing the format war.
@Steve
it doesn’t matter if the Xbox’s GPU is better, the Cell is better then both the PS3′s and the Xbox’s GPU combined. And when developers take full advantage of the Cell the games are clearly better. You don’t compare multiplat games to prove the consoles power, you look at exclusives, and the proof is in the pudding. The PS3 has the edge and that’s that.
“It appears the only reason games are filling up Blu Ray discs is due to developer inefficiency.”
False. The reason games are filling up Blu Rays is to allow textures to be left in an uncompressed format. Much of any graphics card’s resources is spent uncompressing textures to draw on wireframes. It takes a chunk out of the processor, but more than that it monopolizes the VRAM. Uncompressed textures are incredibly large. The 360 can only display so many high res textures on the screen at once due to the VRAM capacity and DVD size. You can see the difference with games like FFXIII. Since FFXIII correctly uses Blu Ray capacity to relieve graphics card stress you will notice that the PS3 version has more and higher quality textures than the 360 version. What it comes down to? The PS3′s video card may not be as fast as the 360′s, but even cell aside it runs more efficiently than the 360′s video card because far fewer resources are wasted. The cell processor is just the icing on the cake. According to Folding@Home it’s 50 times more powerful than the average home PC. Strings of PS3s have been used as mini computers. It’s an amazing architecture. If the PS3 had a $400 graphics card inside it? Even the fastest desktop would be left in the dust.
Reasons why digital distribution aren’t going to work? What internet service can support downloading 50 GBs worth of content? So we can either go backwards in technology, which won’t happen it never does, or we can all get T3 lines and spend 2 entire days downloading a game before we can play it. Cable can only go so fast. We can’t argue with physics, it will always win. So until fiberoptic cable gets run to most homes in the world, digital distribution will be for much lower sized downloads. Reality sucks. It still exists.