Comrade Tovya said:
Garnett and I have have been talking about an interesting subject matter in another thread...
So I'm just curious as to what everyone else thinks right now. Of course, the opinions are subject to change, because it's too early to know yet...
But none-the-less, if you had to make a prediction today, what do you think Microsoft will choose for their next media format for the next XBOX?
The only thing I am almost sure about, is that standard DVDs are not big enough, and it's unlikely that MS or Nintendo would choose to help line Sony's coffers by using Blu-ray (though it is not out of the realm of possibilities or course).
If it were me, I would probably chose HD DVD as the physical format because Toshiba abandoned it, and of course MS is/was part of the HD DVD Consortium and therefore it is partially theirs anyway. Hence, the royalties would be almost nothing to pay out, the disc space is comparable to Blu-ray, and the technology is cheaper and easier to produce discs on than Blu-ray. Plus, there are literally hundreds of thousands of HD DVD drives out there that MS could buy for pennies on the dollar, making the console still relatively cheap.
Plus, as this generation has well shown, people don't really care if their consoles play movies... the Wii doesn't and it's the #1 console on the market by far, the XBOX 360 only play standard DVDs and it sucks at doing that, and the PS3 plays Blu-rays and upconverts beautifully, but it's in far, far last place.
It's my opinion also that MS should offer a full new-release game download service like Sony does with the PSN and then also offer (if they could work it out with the 3rd party guys) a streaming game subscription service... it would be pricey, but for people like me who buy 20-30 game titles a year, it would be cost effective. And for those who only buy 2-3 titles a year, they could just buy a physical disc or download it to their HDD.
Just my idea of course (and is subject to change). What kind of ideas do you guys have?
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