With Microsoft's announcement of the HD DVD Xbox 360 pricing and its 1080p High Definition movie capabilities, it did not take long for Sony to strike back with its own reaction towards this. As the HD DVD Xbox 360 add-on is only intended for playing back HD DVD movies, Sony went to criticise several drawbacks about this add-on, such as offering no enhancement for the gamer, since the HD DVD drive will not be used for games.
Another
issue Sony went to criticise again is Microsoft's use of the legacy 9GB DVD format for games, unlike Sony's own Blu-ray format that offers over five times this capacity on a single disc for developers. Finally, Sony mentioned that Microsoft's HD games patch only upscales lower resolution game graphics to 1080p, unlike the PS3 which has native 1080p support for games as standard.
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"Furthermore, Microsoft's announced HD games patch is really just a compatibility feature - upscaling lower-resolution content does not make it Full HD (1080p), something that PS3 can do out of the box." Microsoft's position, of course, is that it's wrong to charge consumers extra for a next-generation DVD format that only some of them will care about. |
If the standard dual-layer DVD-ROM capacity does not turn out to be much of an issue for game developers, in my opinion, Microsoft does have a significant advantage, at least for now. For example, Microsoft launched its Xbox 360 last year, something they may not have been able to do had they decided to take on HD DVD for its internal drive. Now, they will be offering consumers the ability to buy the drive as an add-on. While the add-on may still seem rather expensive, Sony's upcoming console has the drawback in that consumers have to fork out for the next gen. technology even if they never play back any high definition movies in it.
Source: EuroGamer - News
