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 'A DVD drive as a medium for storing larger and larger games is outdated – and it steps on the toes of a system that bills itself as the high definition leader,' Morris writes.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.'"

Comments

Re:So, Microsoft should do the obvious.

[Narishma]

The WiiU is already confirmed to use a proprietary optical disc (probably based on blu-ray).

Why not HDDVD?

[RyoShin]

Speaking of the format wars, why not chose HD-DVD as the format for the 720?

• It's a proven format; it only lost in terms of sales.
• Blu-ray still has only a small portion of the movie market, so DVD-only playback won't hurt them much. And during the format wars we had dual-players, so if they really want they can do that, too.
• I'm sure there are still some machines used for pressing them sitting around in warehouses.

And, most important:

• Piracy. Piracy. Piracy. With HDDVD as the losing format, there are almost no HDDVD consumer burners out there, and the amount of blank HDDVDs is finite. This will make pirating for the 720 exceedingly hard, if not impossible, which is something that a lot of developers are worried about.

Re:Never going to happen.

[AngryDeuce]

They should dump the optical drive entirely and move to a cartridge-like system using encrypted flash drives. For the majority of people with a solid internet connection they can just buy and download directly to their console from their living room, but for those with crappy/capped bandwidth, the physical flash drive is there for them if they want it.

Hell, they don't even need to really produce pre-made flash drives with the games on them, they could just switch to a kiosk method of distribution. You go down to your local Walmart, go up to the Microsoft kiosk, pick which 'Xbox 720' game you want, it copies that to a generic, proprietary Microsoft flash drive right in the machine, prints a label on it, and shits it out the slot on the bottom, ready to go. The cost of producing that physical copy could easily be offset to the consumer while at the same time giving incentive to people to switch to direct download by allowing for cheaper prices there

No more discs to press on their end, no more discs to get scratched up by the consumer, and it goes a long way towards moving the digital distribution method out of the city and out into the sticks. The games are always up to date (the kiosk can just keep the disc images updated) and not only that, but they can literally offer every single game they produce at every kiosk. A few TB hard drives in the unit and a web connection and you've got access to everything. Hell, they could even combine the unit with a demo machine like the 360 ones and let people play the games before they buy right there in the store!

Seems like it would work well for both them and consumers. Which is probably why it won't happen.