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Squilliam on 22 March 2010
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heruamon said:
Squilliam said:

I think the Blu Ray ship has sailed and its not coming back to harbour unless Microsoft nails a really good deal for all computer manufacturers to switch over to CBHD.

Whilst I do agree that Microsoft will have an optical drive in their next console, I do believe they will offer a console SKU without an Optical drive and that console SKU will be DD only. They'll use a combination of kiosk and internet download to get games out to people as you only have to download the first 1-2GB before you can actually start playing the game.

Possibly...have  netbox console and the traditional model as well.  The thing is, even with a non-optical drive model, you can still have USB and SD card slots to support a physical medium support.  The only reason I think CBHD is viable is because you've basically got a cost effective sort of disc that meets the specs for storage capacity, and more importantly, one that doesn't require you to make drastic modifications to your current equiprment to support DVDs. 

Also the writers for the format haven't even left China so they hardly have to worry about piracy. Cost effective is pretty important especially now that they have yet another fixed cost of $40 or so with the Natal or Natal 2 interface.

Lets see $249 - $40 packaging/shipping/retail = $210

$210 - $80 Natal, controller, cords, leads, power brick, chassis. = $130

$20 saved out of $130 for internal components would be quite significant. Its the difference beween having say 1GB of ram over 2GB of Ram and a much larger HDD at launch.

In addition to this it means their sunk costs towards optical distribution aren't too great that they would have any disincentive to support kiosk/direct download distribution.

 



Tease.