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

Ugh!

[N3Roaster]

So the HD-DVD drive for the XBox 360 (a game console) won't play games and Sony's Blu-Ray drive for PCs won't play Blu-Ray movies. What's the point again?

Are there any games with multiple DVDs yet?

[Donjo]

I remember in the playstation days there were quite a few popular titles that required switching disks (Final fantasy games, grand turismo, metal gear solid etc.) and I don't own a single game that uses multiple dual layer DVDs for actual gameplay. Maybe I just got lucky and didn't buy one but to me that is a sign that the format is not quite dead yet and we don't need to worry about HD-DVD game content.

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.

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