Xbox 360 HD-DVD Player Just for Movies

The Gamerscore blog, an official Microsoft news organ, lays to rest the rumours that the HD-DVD drive might be required to play future 360 games. According to them the new HD drive is solely intended to play movies, and will not be used to accesss game content. From the article: "Since announcing the Xbox 360 HD DVD Player accessory at E3 2006, we've been clear that it is designed exclusively for playing HD DVD movies. It will not play games on HD DVD. At this point, we haven't seen anything to suggest that next-gen DVD formats offer a better game experience than current DVD. What we do know is that these formats will bring added cost to game developers, disc manufacturing, and could even result in added costs and longer load times for the consumer, which would negatively impact the game experience." This is, of course, not to say another peripheral or future version of the console might require such a thing.

Comments

Not entirely true

[aiken_d]

I think the point is that there are no plans to ship games on HDDVD, which makes perfect sense because only a small percentage of 360 users will have the drive.

Since the HDDVD drive itself is basically a transport and laser, and just sends the raw bytes to the 360 for processing, it seems like it would just take a software update of the 360 itself to enable HDDVD games, should the need arise in a year or three. There's no actual movie-specific logic or hardware in the HDDVD drive; no vc-1 decoder, no surround sound processing, nothing. The drive is just like a hard drive: the 360 tells it what sector to read, the drive reads it and provides the raw data with no interpretation.

So it's not that the drive has some physical limitation that means that it can't be used for games, it's just that there are no plans to update the 360 to run games from the drive.

-b