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Xbox 360 to have HD-DVD, Eventually

Posted by timothy on from the 360-view-of-nothing-yet dept.

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."

15 of 409 comments (clear)

  1. Not very smart by Punboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  2. YAY! by Evilhomer2300 · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

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  3. Yep... by Nexum · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... 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.

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    1. Re:Yep... by BackInIraq · · Score: 4, Interesting

      ... 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.

  4. Perfect Plan! by AnswerIs42 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. uhh... by Psx29 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    sega cd?

  6. The Osborne effect by Wizzmer · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

  7. Makes sense to me... by ThePatrioticFuck · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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).

  8. News wrong and over 1month old by NiteStar · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  9. HD-DVD "Games" are the problem by cgenman · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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    1. Re:HD-DVD "Games" are the problem by Stonent1 · · Score: 4, Funny

      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...

    2. Re:HD-DVD "Games" are the problem by snorklewacker · · Score: 4, Insightful

      > 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

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    3. Re:HD-DVD "Games" are the problem by The+Only+Druid · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "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).

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  10. Re:You keep saying that... by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  11. Re:I see it as smart. by Dryth · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.