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

I love options

[The_Pariah]

I said it before, and I'll say it again: I LOVE options.

MS brings up the point I keep pointing out: Next-gen consoles DON'T NEED next-gen media formats. DVD9 is fine.

Sony is still forcing the Blu-Ray format, although the only reason for it is for Sony to push it's agenda that Blu-Ray > HD-DVD. There's no need for Blu-Ray on the PS3. But it's still there. And you HAVE TO pay that premium price ($200 higher than the XBOX 360) even if you never want to watch a soon to be obsolete video format.

Thank you MS for not forcing HD-DVD on us.

Re:I love options

[MaestroSartori]

Disclaimer - I work for Sony as a games programmer.

But I haven't always worked there. I've worked on PS2, Xbox, Gamcube, PSP and PS3 games. Every single platform I've worked on has pushed the capacities of the media we've had to work with for various reasons. Take audio for example. A game with a lot of speech needs a lot of audio, at least until we can get synthesized voices sounding good. Not so bad if you only need to support one language, but us European devs tend to ship games that can support at least three or four languages, sometimes more. So triple or quadruple the amount of audio data you need to store right off the bat. Graphics are the really obvious space eater, though. Higher poly counts, higher resolution textures, shaders requiring multiple textures for multiple passes. More levels, more characters, more sounds, more content. More more more! Yeah, more isn't always better, but all else being equal as a developer I'd rather have loads of space and not need it, than need it and not have it.

Wii is better than cd's

[pawn63295]

Umm the Wii will be better than ps3 and xbox. screw this HD-dvd bluray crap. the ability to hold more information on a disc for the game does nothing for the game unless the creators add extra content to fill the space. Therfore why would u want ungodly load times on a huge cd? I would rather have a few dvd's with bangin load times. O yeah keep spending 79 dollars for a damn xbox game. or 700 dollars on a ps3. No friggin way

They have to do this

[Skraut]

Otherwise you end up with the Sega CD situation. You've fractured your customer base to those that can play games on a HD-DVD, and those that can not. If by some miracle 35% of all 360 owners buy the HD-DVD add on, just how many games do you think would be produced for it. In this day and age where game production decisions are made by accountants, ("another Madden Game, Sure!", "It's not done yet? Put it on the shelves, we need the cash.") just how many bean counters are going to approve a game that 65% of the potential customers can't buy.

Re:They have to do this

[Anonymous Coward]

But what's to stop them from releasing the games on both multiple DVD's and HD? Same thing happened with PC games on CDs vs. DVD for quite some time.

Re:They have to do this

[Anonymous Coward]

It's already been fractured by the lack of a hard drive in one of the models.

Re:It Sure is

[timster]

I guess huge games are kind of nice, but they are not cheap to develop. If you spend $100 million making a game, you are taking a huge risk as you'd need to sell 4 million copies to break even, and few games sell so well. It's far better to spend, say, $35 million per game and make three. That way you can take more creative risks and increase your chances of a surprise hit.

So there is a limit to how big a game can be, and we've basically reached it -- how many DVD games run to multiple disks? Sure, there might be a market for one or two games that could have a budget of $500 million and still make a profit, but those are so rare that it's not worth including an expensive drive just for them. Besides, I'll probably be bored with your $500 million, 400-hour masterpiece after a few weeks anyway. Give me a cool game like Advance Wars, made with care by hopelessly obsessive-compulsive Japanese minimax nerds, and I'll be playing it years later.