Xbox 360 to have HD-DVD, Eventually

thebaboon writes "Bill Gates announced that the Xbox 360 will have an HD-DVD drive, just not for launch. From the article: "According to the statements made by Bill Gates in Japan, Xbox 360, the new gaming console, will include HD-DVD drives. Considering that such a decision would postpone the launching date, Microsoft will equip the initial models with classic DVD drives, and only after the new HD-DVD are ready, the Xbox will incorporate them."

Comments

Not very smart

[Punboy]

This will make fewer people buy the 1st gen, and instead wait for the 2nd gen. Nobody wants to have to pay for an entirely new console to get the HD-DVD functionality. Unless they somehow release an upgrade to the 1st gen boxes, this is REALLY dumb.

Re:Not very smart

[Wesley Felter]

Come on, you know the fanboys will be lined up at midnight to buy 360s. I suspect quite a few people either don't have HDTVs or don't use their Xbox to watch movies anyway.

Re:Not very smart

[timeOday]

people don't seem to be as careful about issues such as forward compatability or even value for their money.

The whole beauty of the console is that if you buy a game for your console, it actually WORKS. If Microsoft does this, the word XBox2 won't mean anything - you have to specify XBox2-v1 vs XBox2-HD or something. I don't think people want such subtleties in a console, it leads to tantrums on Christmas morning when Johnnie's new game won't load.

Re:Not very smart

[Wesley Felter]

Xbox 360 games must be on DVD; they cannot be on HD-DVD. Thus there is no problem.

YAY!

[Evilhomer2300]

Yay! I just paid out my rear end for this new 360, and now, a BETTER ONE is released later on. I'll just buy a new one, cause I have so much money. It's sorta like the plus pack for Windows XP, only this upgrade is worth more then half a soggy cookie.

Yep...

[Nexum]

... there's nothing so bright as selling a console where some users have different capabilities than others.

Potential to fragment and confuse the XBox 360 market.

Re:Yep...

[BackInIraq]

... there's nothing so bright as selling a console where some users have different capabilities than others.

Potential to fragment and confuse the XBox 360 market.

The funny part is that in the current generation they were the only one of the three that DIDN'T fracture their market this way...by shipping all Xboxes with ethernet and a hard drive standard, they made sure that everybody had the same console, so that software publishers could target those features knowing that they'd be aiming for the -entire- market. There's a reason networking never really took off for PS2 and GameCube in this generation, and I'll be interested to see how successful HD-DVD is for the Xbox in the next.

This is called "Screw the Die-Hard Gamer" XP

[TellarHK]

Yep, that's brilliant. Completely screw all the die-hards that buy early or pre-order machines, so they don't get a feature that'll be a major selling point a while down the road. Sounds like the wrong way to market a console to me.

Perfect Plan!

[AnswerIs42]

1) Release 360 for Holiday Season
2) ?
3) Profit!
4) RE-Release 360 Later with HD-DVD
5) MORE Profit!

All the more reason I WON'T be getting a 360 till about a year after release. Heck, I didn't get an X-Box till about 7 months ago.

uhh...

[Psx29]

sega cd?

It will kill all initial sales

[fsterman]

Loss of initial sales means fewer number on the market. The fewer on the market means that developers have less reason to make games for that consol, and with less games it will mean fewer buyers.

A similar occurance with the DreamCast. Fewer people bought it and was waiting for the "vastly more powerful" PS2. Now Sega no longer makes a console thanks to the above cycle.

The Osborne effect

[Wizzmer]

Sounds like Bill is doing an Osborne (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect)

Makes sense to me...

[ThePatrioticFuck]

I think MS may be hedging their bets on this one. There's still a ton of talk going on about which format to go with as the standard (HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray vs. some hybrid version). By holding off a bit, they still get to market ahead of Sony and depending on when/if a format is chosen, they can put out a drive that is supported by the 360 with a simple software update. If they put in an HD-DVD drive now, they're stuck with it (and possible a dead format).

Hardware fragmentation

[xswl0931]

I think some of you are over reacting over the news that future XBox360's will incorporate a HD-DVD. Considering that 99% of game barely use the space on a single DVD (I'm not sure if any use dual layer DVDs). It's likely that XBox 360 games will only come out on DVD. I suspect that there will be two different SKUs for the XBox 360, one with the DVD drive and the other with HD-DVD. And the HD-DVD one will cost more for those who want it.

News wrong and over 1month old

[NiteStar]

Wha! Slashdot did it again. http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-Microsoft-Toshi ba-HD-DVD-Alliance-Changes-Xbox-360-3902.shtml This article was posted on 28th of June 2005, 16:45 GMT ... juNE juNE juNE. On a 2nd note ... softpedia is wrong too. Bill Gates said it (over 1 month ago): ``The initial shipments of Xbox 360 will be based on today's DVD format,'' Gates said. ``We are looking at whether future versions of Xbox will incorporate an additional capability of an HD DVD player or something else.'' It's not confirmed what-so-ever! see: http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/8591/Xbox-360-Might- Incorporate-HD-DVD-Drive/ or http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000101&si d=aIoj6W6mNl_M&refer=japan

HD-DVD "Games" are the problem

[cgenman]

I've written this before, but there are a million ways to fill a HD-DVD. You could, for example, render out a version of all of your textures with time-of-day effects, and swap between them mid-game. You could add modifiers to all of your audio streams to get audio for various locations. You could pregen background or in-game assets, like applying a movie to a wall texture to make it appear that it has more depth than it does. You could pregenerate a thousand different havok crash animations, and randomly select between them. You can use a slow algorithm to populate a forest, make a few large-scale, adjustments, and save out the results as a sectionally loaded world the size of montana.

When the transition was made between CD and DVD games, it was said that a DVD would never be filled. Well, they're filled. And BTW, nobody would accept a Dual-Sided DVD. Do you know how annoying it would be to be told every few minutes to flip your disk over?

The question, really, is will anyone release games on HD-DVD instead of DVD? I'm betting so, as there will be blue-ray games getting ported from the PS3. And when that happens, whoever bought the DVD version of the Xbox will be screwed out of playing the lastest Final Fantasy, or Gran Turismo 5, or Fable 2.

As a HD-DVD player I could care less. But as a game console that is supposed to play HD-DVD games, this will anger a lot of suddenly ex-customers.

Re:HD-DVD "Games" are the problem

[Sycraft-fu]

All you ideas are interesting, but you quickly discover they aren't worthwhile in a game, epsically one on modren hardware like the Xbox is going to have. You just can't render enough textures to truly account for every situation, every angle, etc, and even if you could you can't swap it off disc fast enough (HDs are too slow for it and DVDs make them look downright speedy). So what you do instead is write mathematical formulas that describe the surface, and have the card render them. That's the procedural textures you often hear about.

Net result is the textures look more real, and properly react to the environment, they change as the light does and so on. That's actually how it's nearly always done on for high-end rendering. You don't texture map something, that won't look good, instead you use material shaders to describe the surfaces, and the engine calculates how it all looks.

For games this kind of thing is still in it's infancy, but it's growing fast and will be big on next gen consoles. On the Xbox, the graphics card had the capability to do this, but in a pretty limited capacity, so it only got used for certian things (like a specular layer or for water or something). The 360 is on par with the latest nVidia 7000 series chips, and it has the shaders to do a whole ot of this.

Sound is likewise handled like this. The sound processor convolutes teh sound in realtime in reaction to the environment. That actually works really well even on older hardware like the Xbox. It'l even take in to account the number and locations of your speakers if you like.

I'm not saying it's impossible to fill a DVD, but doesn't seem likely. Like I said, average game today is running maybe 3-4 CDs in size. You get about 12 CDs worth of space on a DL DVD, so that's some room to grow.

Re:HD-DVD "Games" are the problem

[Stonent1]

And BTW, nobody would accept a Dual-Sided DVD. Do you know how annoying it would be to be told every few minutes to flip your disk over? Someone's never owned an Apple II...

Re:HD-DVD "Games" are the problem

[snorklewacker]

> I've written this before, but there are a million ways to fill a HD-DVD.

You mention a dozen esoteric ways to fill a HD-DVD except the obvious one:

Full motion video at 1080p

Re:HD-DVD "Games" are the problem

[The Only Druid]

"Net result is the textures look more real, and properly react to the environment, they change as the light does and so on. That's actually how it's nearly always done on for high-end rendering. You don't texture map something, that won't look good, instead you use material shaders to describe the surfaces, and the engine calculates how it all looks."

Except you're wrong. Most textures in the highest resolution systems (e.g. movies, etc.) are most certainly NOT procedural. They're just extremely high-resolution texture maps (including high-resolution normal and bump maps).

Procedural textures are extremely important and useful, but there are certain effects (such as the texturing of a face - which requires coloring specific to the contours of a face, etc.) that are not viable via procedural textures but are easily accomplished with high-res textures. Your comments indicate that you don't understand the workflow involved in high-end rendering, much less games (which involve more texture mapping and less procedural texturing than film work).

Re:HD-DVD "Games" are the problem

[Sycraft-fu]

No I understand it quite well, you seem to have a concept of how things were done a couple years ago. Yes, games like Deus Ex did the high-res texture trick you talk about, detail textures I believe they were called. You'd get close to an object, they'd render another layer of textures to give additonal detail. Of course this still isn't what the GP was talking about, this was another layer of rendering.

Now normal mapping is something else entirely. That's an operation to fake geometry, more or less. Tou design a high detail model, then you cut it way down so it can work well on a graphics card. Then you use a normal map to fill in the missing detail, which it does faily well.

Also I'd note normal mapping in games is exceedingly rare these days.

Now you are correct in that there are methods for using modified texture mapping to do high resolution renderings, such a thing was done in Fight Club for the apartment scenes. However that isn't the direction computer games are moving. They come from a realm of nothing but texture maps. The orignal 3d games were just mapped textures and a light map on that. Not until the GeForce 3 genrations of cards could you get mathematical textures. As time goes on cards get better and better at this (having more powerful pixel shaders is a big thing) and games go over to it.

It's not supprising, space aside, games have demands movies don't. In a movie, you know the lighting, the camera angles, etc. So you can work on your textures and have them right for what you are doing. Not the case in a game, people can wander aroundand do as they please. A texture needs to look good from all arbitrary angles, not just one. The lighting can change as well, as the environment is dynamic. Thus it makes a lot of sense to use procedural textures.

In some cases it's real simple. World of Warcraft basicaly throws a specular shader on a bunch of stuff to make it shiny. Cheap trick, but nice visualy. Doom 3 makes far greater use to get reflections off of surfaces to look somewhat correct.

Regardless of all this, the point stands. You go ahead and render every texture and light combination perfectly form every angle. You aren't streaming that off DVD in a fashion to make a game playable. It needs to be done in realtime in hardware.

I see it as smart.

[standards]

Releasing the XBox without HD-DVD will permit the delivery of the games and consoles many many months before the delivery of the PS3 . And the lack of HD-DVD will negatively impact very few users - please recall that few world-wide households have HDTV - less than 1%! And about zero percent have HD-DVD discs.

Microsoft is playing second fiddle now, and it's XBox division WILL die if it doesn't improve its very disappointing numbers. Microsoft requires the advantage of delivering significantly before Sony. If it means that HD-DVD comes in as an upgrade, so be it.

Will some people want HD-DVD? Yes. But those people who can actually use the technology are in the very very distant minority.

Re:I see it as smart.

[Dryth]

And the lack of HD-DVD will negatively impact very few users - please recall that few world-wide households have HDTV - less than 1%! And about zero percent have HD-DVD discs.

HD-DVD != HDTV. It's a higher capacity format, and while the specification does include higher resolutions for HD-DVD video, the higher capacity (and perhaps bandwidth) is more relevant to gaming. The problem is it would create two classes of Xbox 360s, meaning older consoles would need to be physically upgraded to play new content on HD-DVDs.

Where HDTV is concerned, at last check roughly 10% of households in America have HDTVs. These are individuals willing to spend more money on their entertainment technology and willing early adopters; this is exactly a company selling gaming devices would be targeting.

The Osborne Effect

[nathanh]

A number of people have already commented that this is a dumb marketing move - announcing "a better product coming out Real Soon now" - because at least some purchasers will wait rather than buy the first generation and get an inferior product.

This marketing mistake has a name; The Osborne Effect. Apparently an urban legend but never the less a good one, it describes how a similar announcement crippled Osborne Computers in the 1980s. Nice to know that even 20 years later, Microsoft is still copying ideas from competitors <g>.

Re:You keep saying that...

[Wesley Felter]

No, HD-DVDs actually have more space (30GB) than regular DVDs (8.5GB).

Re:No, probably work fine in America at least

[javaxman]

While Japan is real big on the "console that does everything" in a large part because apartments tend to be small, that's not such an issue in the states.

There is one thing we're pretty sensitive to here in the states, though- actually, much more sensitive to than the Japanese: being screwed over by being the early adopter. It's bad enough to know that HDTV prices are going to drop, which is certainly keeping a decent number of folks away from those; here we have an example of a product that not only might see superior competition released in another six months ( competition which will play all those PS2 games you have sitting around ), but definitely will be supplanted by a superior model in another 6 months. It's like buying a computer, except you don't _have_ to buy it to get your project done.

As such, if MS is worried they might not have a great supply of these things in the first 6 months, this might stem demand.

IF, on the other hand, they really want people to buy them the minute they're available, they need to spell out what the upgrade path is and make the cost known up-front. This makes me really NOT want to buy a 360. I was thinking about it before, but you know what? Maybe I'll wait until PS3s are available in the wild, and can be compared side-to-side with an Xbox 360 with HD-DVD, so I can make a more informed decision about which to buy.

An upgrade is certianly an option too, bring your box to an authorized dealer, they upgrade it, maybe for free, maybe for a small charge.

You're dreaming if you think a new HDDVD for the 360 will be a cheap option, and you're crazy if you think it's going to be free. Sorry, that's just silly to say.

It's just hard to generate that much data for a game. You can only develop so much content on a reasonable budget.

Who ever said anything about games developed on a resonable budget? Those will still be current-generation games, for the most part... this generation of console games are going to have budgets that dwarf those of many smaller movies, and are going to include lots and lots of HD movie content ( which, now that you mention it, isn't necessarily super-expensive to create, but these will be crazy-big-budget games). That'll fill up an HD-DVD real fast, all that HD video.

I think any disadvantage of having peopel wait will be compensated by being first to market.

Game console history is littered with the dead, forgotten bodies of the first-to-market. Knowing a more capable XBox will be released in 6 months or so of the original, and that games might be released that the original can't play... those are concepts that make me really NOT want to buy an Xbox. Sure, if I have plenty of cash burning a hole in my pocket, maybe... but maybe I'd sink it into a gaming PC or graphics card instead. As it is, I'm like most Americans, and I can't afford to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on every game console that comes out, just to line Microsoft's pockets... I'll be waiting and watching, looking to compare the Xbox 360 HD-DVD directly with the PS3 Blu-Ray. No, it won't be about the disc format, it'll be about the games... but even if I had been thinking I'd for sure buy the 360, I think knowing the HD-DVD version would be out within a year might make me think twice...

Re:You keep saying that...

[crashelite]

HD - DVD 15 GB single layer... 30 GB dual layer... triple-layer disc is in development, which would offer 45GB of storage... Blu-ray 1.0 25 GB single layer... 50 GB dual layer... and i heard somewhere they have the 100 GB disks and still are working on the 200 GB version... also data transfer rate is 36 Mbit/s (54 Mbit/s for BD-ROM) and 72 Mbit/s transfer rate are in development (could not find that data transfer rate on the HD - DVD drives so umm ya... oh well) boils down to what one will suit them best... in my opinion blu-ray is amazing... less bottle neck = faster game play (not to mention load times would be WAY less when ever i play halo its like LOAD COME ON!!!)