Blu-ray has been getting around 30% marketshare in terms of actual dollars spent on physical media disks in the U.S, up from 20% a couple of years ago.  Seriously,  microsoft would be shooting themselves in the foot if they didnt include a bluray player in their next console

 Microsoft would be crazy not to include Blu Ray. i'm sure they will

Nice!

yeah, i def agree about the capacity reasoning, but regardless this will push the adoption of more blu-ray purchased, as now we will have 2 out of the 3 major brands of consoles supporting blu-ray.  I like HD so i think that this will be a great thing.  Perhaps we will see 35-40% bluray marketshare a year or two after the 720 comes out.

It will free up some time for developers not having to worry too much about compression or cutting stuff or how to split game content over multiple discs. Instead that time can hopefully be spend on adding bonus stuff again like making of videos and concept art if the room is there anyway.

Personally I'm hoping for the comeback of pre-rendered cut scenes perhaps with characters rendered into pre-rendered backgrounds. Tighter more focussed cutscenese without loading times that show off the artwork in the best possible way, while all the loading is done in the background.

As for blu-ray movies, it looks like the industry is quite happy to keep the price high and the adoption low. There seems no real intent to lower the prices of blu-ray for mass adoption ($39 for 3D blu-rays really?) so I guess it's going to stay along dvd for a long time to come.

Blu Ray will be in the Next Xbox, with 50GB capacity but a much much faster spped like Dvd, probably 16x.

Blu-ray is only 30%? Still? That's terrible. Adoption is really slow and it will likely be replaced by digital downloads before it ever becomes dominate. Still it would be advisable for MS to adopt for their next system if just for room for game data.

Where are you getting 30% from? The most I've seen is about 25%. The latest report is 21%

http://www.homemediamagazine.com/market-analysis/sales-report-week-ended-071412

In terms of actual unit sales it's more like 15%, and this after what - 6 yrs on the market. Also these figures are just the top 20 sales only. If they could track the $5 bargain bin dvds found everywhere the numbers would skew even more in dvd's favor.  Blu-ray is proving to be just a niche market.  Plus you still don't have pc games on blu-ray and probably never will. I think ms should do the pc thing and put hard drives in all there nextboxes and and cheap dvd drives just like pcs. What does it take to install a pc game nowadays - 30 minutes? How long are the mandatory blu-ray installs?

I completely agree, and it's pretty sad to be honest. I love Blu-Ray films, I love having a physical copy that I can buy in store and I love having the best quality, but digital downloads and streaming will probably take over Blu-Ray really begins to dominate.

What do you mean?