ZenfoldorVGI said:
I would hate Microsoft for trying to pitch me on the purchase of Blu-Ray, and indeed forcing me to buy Blu-Ray despite the fact that it is entirely needless for gaming, and in most cases, also completely useless, with mandatory installs and all. You see, if MS forced us to pay extra and buy a Blu-Ray device, in order for them to help the new device become better adopted and more popular, then they would have been screwing over the gamers, in favor of their own new unrelated product. They would be making gamers pay for their new thing, by requiring a purchase of it, with their new gaming console, despite it being a totally seperate thing alltogether. It would be like Microsoft making me buy a pair of 200 dollar wireless headphones with the next Xbox 360. Sure, those headphones could convievably have a use in gaming, but they are completely needless, and Microsoft is only making us buy them because they know we will, and they don't care about the customers they lose because they refuse to buy the stupid, expensive, pointless, and completely out of left field, heaphones. That is why I would hate Microsoft, and smile at every failure their stupid headphones would have cost them. |
Blu-Ray does have gaming benefits. They will probably be more strongly felt as this generation wears on, but they are there already. 360 games could be better with Blu-Ray discs (or HD-DVD). Perfectly legitimate choice whether to include it or not in their console, and a likely reason MS didn't is because the only way to jump ahead in sales and remain viable this gen was to forego them.
The discs are also hard to scratch, though this assumes that the console's optical drive isn't itself scratching the shit out of discs (ahem)...I don't know whether Blu-Ray discs can handle that, or whether they would offset the problem of a bad drive...
Possibility of watching HD movies is another benefit of HD discs, not gaming related, but then I don't get the your strongly held value of "don't include anything not essential to gaming in a console." You can say it was a bad business move, but we won't know the extent that's correct until we see all Blu-Ray revenues in total, years in the future, and see how PS3 turns out. At any rate, nearly all gamers like to watch movies and there's probably no other demographic conceivable that would be more likely to want HD movies.
I don't think it would be true that MS would "not care about the customers they lose"...nor Sony, obviously not. And as for Sony, I think they take damn good care of fans with with quality hardware, free online, and tons of good first party.
Anyway, I see that cost of Blu-Ray to you is like RRoD and other/later 360 breakdown problems are to me: absolutely unforgiveable. Catch you on the flipside.
