After some confusion on whether or not the Xbox 360 will take on HD DVD support, Microsoft's chairman Bill Gates has confirmed that a later version of the Xbox 360 will indeed incorporate a HD DVD player or something else. However, even if the Xbox 360 console takes on HD DVD support at a later stage, it will certainly not be used for games. Instead, the only benefit of adding HD DVD support will be to watch HD DVD movies.
According to Japan's chief of Xbox operations, as the initial Xbox 360's will only support the DVD format, Microsoft does not want to change its optical disc format later on such that gamers would need to upgrade their console in order to play games using a disc format incompatible with their original Xbox 360's. This means that every Xbox 360 game released throughout the Xbox 360's cycle will be playable back to the first Xbox 360's put on the market.
Sony on
the other hand will offer Blu-ray support from the very start in its upcoming
PlayStation 3, which means that this console will be designed to work with both
Blu-ray HD movies as well as games using Blu-ray media. However, due to
the high cost of
incorporating a Blu-ray drive in the console from the very start, the PlayStation 3 console is expected to cost much more than that of the Xbox 360.
|
"The initial shipments of Xbox 360 will be based on today's DVD format," Gates explained. "We are looking at whether future versions of Xbox 360 will incorporate an additional capability of an HD DVD player or something else." However, Japan's chief of Xbox operations, Yoshihiro Maruyama, has confirmed that while a version of the Xbox 360 console which can read HD-DVD discs is a possibility, the next-generation DVD standard will never be used for games on the platform. "It's a possibility, but it won't have any relationship to gaming," Maruyama said, according to a translation from US website GameSpot. "If the Xbox 360 uses a next-generation DVD drive in the future, it will only be used for watching movies that run on next-generation DVDs." |
As Blu-ray holds several times the capacity of a DVD, it will be interesting to see if this puts Microsoft's Xbox at a disadvantage when it comes to the limitation of the media capacity. Then again, the Xbox will likely have a better advantage at the start due to much lower console pricing. As most consumers use a dedicated DVD player watching movies at present, chances are that the benefit of adding a next generation optical drive to the Xbox 360 console will not make sell much better.
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Source: Gamer Lounge
