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What Microsoft Should and Shouldn't Do For the Xbox 720
donniebaseball23 writes "Xbox 360 just came off a record November, with more than 1.7 million units sold in the U.S., but behind closed doors Microsoft is planning its next move for the successor to the popular console. Plenty of Xbox 720 rumors have surfaced in recent months, but veteran games journalist Chris Morris has filtered through them to provide a realistic take on what Microsoft should and shouldn't do with Xbox 360's successor. In particular, he notes that Microsoft should adopt the Blu-ray format from Sony. 'A DVD drive as a medium for storing larger and larger games is outdated – and it steps on the toes of a system that bills itself as the high definition leader,' Morris writes. 'Microsoft resisted the move to Blu-ray this generation without any ill effects. It even survived picking the losing side in the format battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD, but it can't rely on the DVD to take it into the next generation.'"
That doesn't actually work.
I've always thought bandwidth is insanely expensive inside the U.S.
I pay 24€ a month for my TV, phone and 100/50 Mbit/s internet. No caps, no restrictions, no throttling.
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/97047-thank-you-farmville-pc-gaming-will-soon-overtake-consoles
For the last couple of years, the revenue from console video game sales has stagnated at around $23 billion per year. PC game sales, on the other hand, have grown from $13 billion to $18 billion over the past two years.
I'd say that's booming.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
From what I understand it's essentially BluRay - 25GB for a single layer disc, but they won't pay the licensing fees so it won't be called BluRay and it won't play BluRay movies. Just like the Wii discs are exactly the size of DVDs, the same capacity as DVDs, but technically they're not DVDs and it doesn't play DVD movies. I think you can be pretty sure both the drives and discs come from the very same factories that produce BluRays...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Riff of a joke form when the 360 was first announced.
The joke was "So called because you'll turn 360 degrees and walk away", which almost makes sense for the first fraction of a second before you realise that that would mean spinning on the spot. The joke about the XBox 360 became a joke at the expense of whoever made the comment.
this is extending that joke with a funny image of people spinning round twice.
Optical drives are SLOW.
slow slow slow.
So slow, this is the reason you need to install so many PS3 games. slow slow slow.
FTFY
Why are they so slow you ask? (and I'm glad you did)
They are slow because of a little thing called centrifugal force. If you've ever ridden on a merry go round you are familiar with CF. The same CF that threw you off of the merry go round is at work on spinning platters. Go beyond a certain spinning speed and the polycarbonate material the BD or DVD or CD or even the aluminum/glass ceramic the HDD is made out of will disintegrate. That's why the XBox 720i (in partnership with BMW) will have an SSD for running it's core and a HDD for booting games that actually run "In The Cloud".
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
It just isn't as cheap and fast to mass-produce multigigabit cartridges as it is to stamp optical disks.
It's basically start-up speed vs game cost and game content volume tradeoff. N64 and PS1 has shown this well.
And download could be even cheaper and game data size then could be limited only by space available on user's device, but with current state of broadband it's just not viable yet.