yes it does need the disc, no it doesnt need to access the disc,

Ive got a brilliant idea, why doesnt microsoft create an install disc so consumers can install cg audio and whatever else to the hdd, and u insert the play disc and when it needs to load something just use the hdd for loading it, u know like the old pc days, baulders gate and diablo2 anyone??

who the hell streams entire movies? the 360 and ps3 would be the last place i go for a movie download. and digital download content is the future? oh that's so awesome maybe ill download a game and bring it over my friends house oh wait...it's in digital universe

If Sony chose DVD instead of blu-ray it would have won this gen, at least against the 360.

(as the console would have cost about 200$ less and no more transfer rate/ mandatory install issues)

PS3 is in 3rd place now because of blu-Ray.

Xbox might need blu-Ray or something similarfor its' next "720" or whatever console, but it's more likely to use flash memory instead.

To be fair lots of arguments make sense for and against it.

I'd say we're about a decade or so away from downloads on a massive scale,maybe even more than a decade.Some people have incredible connections,and their more than up for it obviously,however there's a lot of people who don't have as good connections.There's not much need to continue to talking about that as it's a fact I assume you all know.

Another thing is people's personal preference for having physical media.I've got a small but impressive collection of 500 DVD's and about 100 Blu Ray's,and it's nice to sometimes just sit back and look at the collection I've built up.I find it far more impressive than looking at the 130GB's of downloaded music I have on a hard drive (all of which of course is legally there....).
I speak to a lot of people,and most people prefer to have physical media,only people who re really into their tech seem to like downloads I find.

Another thing is the price.Particularly on services like Xbox Live and WiiWare where you don't use actual money.In shops,sometimes they can have a special offer on a new game out by dropping it to £29.99 even though it is more or less a new release,and of course there's preowned sales.Downloads will always stick to RRP,which is why I'll never favour them.

Another thing that gets me,it was only a few years ago that Microsoft was pushing HD DVD so much so they had plans to include a drive for the media on their orignial Elite models before the death of the format (rumour I heard).I think Microsoft is just being a sore loser on the matter of Blu Ray seeing as some of they'd have to pay to start using the drives would go toward their current arch nemesis whose beat them nearly every week in WW sales since the release of the slim Playstation 3.

Also,it's been 5 years since the release of the 360.If they included a drive at this stage,it would be pretty pointless as they couldn't really do anything with it.At the most it would be simply added on as an extra drive to play Blu Ray movies,like their original HD DVD add on.

1. We have the connections needed for downloads for just the gamers who are interested. Theres a strong overlap between a good internet connection and console/pc gaming. Its not like movies, the average download for your typical attach rate would only be at worst 100GB per year (5 games per console per year and 3* the size of current Xbox 360 games).

2. People said the same thing about CD sales and every year CD sales decline whilst digital downloads increase.

3. Steam has excellent deals, digital distribution can offer great specials. Like for instance I got Stalker + Red Faction + Company of Heroes + Warhammer Dawn of War for $50. Without physical stock its easier and not harder to offer one time or short term deals.

4. No its because HD-DVD is much cheaper and they share a laser assembly. It wouldn't have cost much at all to include HD-DVD but including Blu Ray is much more expensive. I don't think Sony regrets paying Microsoft millions every week for Windows either, and Microsoft is definately not sore about PSN on Windows Mobile 7.

5. Yup, which is why they don't want it.

Touhce TwistedPixel...

It seems a lot of the anti's in this thread seem to think that technology is always going to be what it is now, that compression techniques and procedurally generated content will never get better. Google is putting 500mb lines in 30 cities in America this year (I beleive it's this year)! You could download a PS3 sized game in less than an hour at that speed, can you drive to the store and buy a disk much faster than that? That the next gen of systems won't be powerful enough to uncompress virtually unlimited data at incredible speeds. Technology is getting faster, more efficient and streamlined every day, these arguments that basically say "You can't do X!" are rediculous and have a really good chance of being proven wrong in 6 months! Some of this is really coming off as blind Sony defense.

For the record I support physical media, I like having the trappings of my hobby and I believe DD has a place just not replacing physical media. I just don't like seeing people making broad negative generalizations about technology with no reason beyond liking their gaming system.

no not at all, in my opinion it's value is already devalued as soon as it hit's the internet.

you can collect digital download's but the value is less than physical media, also as long as people like to collect thing's which is never going to change physical media will alway's be seen as value greater than digital download's.

also with a score like this it's not going to be anywhere near what DIGITAL DOWNLOADS would need to be to overcome packaged Media an Im very sorry to say it's most likely going to be  that way for a very long time:

Blu-ray Sells over $200m in Jan-Feb 2010, Restores Growth for Packaged Media

According to aggregate weekly estimates from the research department of Home Media Magazine, revenues from Blu-ray sales in the US in 2010 through February were $200.95 million, 59% more than in the same period of 2009. Additionally, thanks to Blu-ray, the revenue from packaged-media sales stopped falling and grew 3% year-on-year.

As to market share, Blu-ray accounted for 11.7% of packaged-media sales revenue in the first two months of the year. In Jan-Feb 2009, this percentage was 7.6%.

The biggest-selling week was the week ended January 3, with $37.72 million in BD sales. The slowest week was the week ended February 21, with $18.58 million.

It is worth mentioning that Blu-ray sold more in these relatively slow two first months of the year than digital downloads did in the whole of 2009 ($199 million, including both standard-definition and high-definition, according to Screen Digest). In spite of all the continuous hype from tech sites and web pundits about the impending digital domination and the disc's demise, the public seems to see much more value in a movie when it comes on a high-quality physical support with top-notch video, audio and extras than on a downloaded video file.

Home Media Magazine

Actually I guess a lot of it is also due to gaps where layer switches occur.  Duplicated data is only a big issue for multi-disc games and some blu-ray games to make up for the slower read speed.

Here is the article explaining how DD or installed to hard drive games can use less space:

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/engineeringblog/default.htm

"All storage media (flash, hard drives, discs, etc) have a layout that dictates where and how the files will be stored.  Optical disc drives spin the disc at a constant velocity which means that as the head reads the data from the disc and moves towards the center, the data will be read faster.  Xbox 360 game disc layouts are optimized for the reading speeds of optical discs drives and attempt to concentrate the game disc data at the fastest read locations on the disc.  This typically ends up creating gaps at the beginning, end, and in the middle of the disc layout where layer 1 transfers to layer 2.  When we first released the “Play from hard drive” feature in 2008, we did not do any detection of gaps that can exist in between game code in disc layouts.  We started our game copy at the first sector where the game started (skipping the gap at the beginning of the disc) and copied the disc until we hit the last readable sector of the disc where the game code ended (skipping the gap at the end of the disc).   During the 2008 release, we decided to not optimize out the gaps that can occur in the middle of the game code in the disc layout.

Fast forward to the 2009 release: we went back and examined how much potential space savings we could deliver to customers by removing these gaps that can occur in the middle of the game code in the disc layout.  Around the same time, we got the official green light for Xbox 360 Games on Demand project which meant customers were going to be downloading these packages, thus it was even a higher priority to squeeze the image size down as small as possible.  We did a bunch of analysis to determine the sizes of these gaps in the middle of the disc layout as well as how we could remove it during the disc image creation process.  Since everyone loves data, here is a snap shot of the data that we collected to make the decision whether the code investment to remove the gaps in the middle would pay off:

After collecting this data we knew that this would be highly valuable since we would obtain a median savings of 453MB per game for both hard drive space and download time.  Since both “Play from hard drive” and “Xbox 360 Games on Demand” use the same underlying technology we were able to make the code change to remove these gaps for both."