ctalkeb said:
Everyone else: I think I have showed clearly that Blu-ray is growing in the UK and that it is currently a far bigger format than DD. My view is that given its projected growth, and the limitations of DD (in some markets at the very least), I can see no good reason to not include it in a device intended to be general entertainment box. The playback capabilites of the X360 were not underspecced in my opinion, but sticking to the same specs, both for playback and network speeds, in the next generation will be a mistake (provided that the nextbox will follow up on the promise of all-in-one entertainement). |
For the bolded part, don't forget Microsoft put the DVD dongle in place on the original Xbox to save on having to pay any licensing fees, this is one possible reason they may want to not include Bluray on their next console. They would potentially have to pay a fee for including the drives in their console and extra fees for disc manufacturing. I'm not saying this is a smart reason why they wouldn't just pointing out there is some reasons they wouldn't go this route, particularly with the efforts they've made to build their DD content over the last few years.
As for the last sentence you're absolutely correct imo, Bluray speeds, capacity and price seem to all point as it being a mature sensible move to use in their next console. There is no way we'll see games above 50GB for a long time (imo) and newer faster Bluray drives will not need data duplication to offset seek speed issues so visually equivalent games to the PS3's library would be smaller in size next gen due to no data duplication anyway. I said 50GB although I know if really necessary they could plan for 100GB if they wanted.
