joeorc said:
but would that same HD DVD equipment cost 1B today if the HD DVD would have one the format war? not to mention the IHD licence fee's that Microsoft would have made per ever HD TOPSET BOX. like i sttated it was a risk. and also yes you are right not every game would be required to need more than 7GB of space right now but say in 3 year's what then? we do not know. my Q: still still stand's what would Microsoft put as its optical drive in the next Xbox it releases, would it still use DVD or would it go for HD DVD optical drive or no OPTICAL drive at all, and go all digital download and offer an external optical drive if you want to play xbox360 game's on the new ver. of the xbox. my point is would the xbox360 suffer loss of support when the next xbox come's out due to the next xbox having better overall hardware, what would seperate it mainly from the xbox360? the longer this generation goes on the less likely the jump frm the previous generation to the current system's had a much bigger impact than I think will happen in the next generation system's get released. I Think the impact will no be as great due to thestrength of each system's support have you ever seen a third place system get this much support as much as the ps3 has already attained already for a 3rd place console? let alone with a) more system's on the market at one time vs' previous generation's all competing for you time as a gamer and your money. b) when the systems are not even 5 year's old into the generation remember the previous gen. ps2 had a 300Mhz xbox360 had a 766 Mhz the game cube had 405 Mhz today we have system's in the 3,2 Ghz, and with multiple core's less static system because of the software can be tweaked. that bery same thing that make's thes unit's better as time goe's on make's it one of the very reason's they would in all likelyhood remain on the shelf longer thus the longer the system keep's selling the cheaper it become's to manufacture , so how would the HD DVD 15 GB disc not benefit the xbox360 over time due to the cost's would be lower. unless you could not see the xbox360 notbeing able to sell more aystem's when the price goes to $99.00. what would the sale's of a $99.00 xbox360 compard to the sale's of a $99.00 PS2? |
It was a risk that they were unwilling to take. Had they taken it they would be unlikely to ever break even with the Xbox 360. It would have also probably torpedoed the Arcade SKU as the read speed for the HD-DVD drives probably weren't that great back in 2005. Its not about whether the system would benefit, of course it would but whether it would be a cost effective benefit that Microsoft would be willing to lay out hard cash for.
If we're talking about 3 years from now in the context of an expected consoles life-cycle from the beginning to end its pretty irrelevant. 3 years from now is 7 years from launch and consoles are expected to 'max out' their hardware capabilities sometime between the fourth and sixth year. So now we're seeing a few games 'max out' the DVD drive which is to be expected. However in the context of the capabilities of a console, it would still be a struggle for most games to effectively make use of the extra space. The system was probably expected to have a replacement this year or next year in 2005 so look at it from that perspective.
The question of what drive for a next generation system really depends on the entire ecosystem of technology they develop and which is available. Its pretty assured that 6* Blu Ray drives will be common enough, perhaps even 8* Blu Ray Drives with effectively 3-4* the overall bandwidth so just from that it makes sense to use the drive even if the space isn't needed overall.
The speed of a processor is not an effective determination of its capabilities. Also just because software can be tweaked it doesn't change the fundamentals of the system in the quantity of texture ram available etc. I also doubt that the system would suffer a drop in support because of the DVD drive as a lot of companies are revamping their content delivery for online networks and they cannot effectively deliver more than a DVD worth of content over the internet.
Essay Pro