Microsoft Says Blu-ray Holds No 360 ValueMicrosoft Says Blu-ray Holds No 360 Value
Rumors float around the Internet questioning when Microsoft will ship a Blu-ray enabled Xbox 360 or add-on device like they did with the, now failed, HD-DVD. At CES 09 Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices division, says this request is “way down the list.”
Mr. Bach had some great selling points as to why a Blu-ray player has little value in the world of Xbox 360. The primary reason, of course, being the Xbox 360 developers cannot take advantage of Blu-ray as a development platform for games. This was the price Sony, or the consumer, paid to own a PlayStation 3 since all games are printed on the media and are, in effect, Blu-ray “capable.”
We say capable because not all (any?) PlayStation 3 games currently make full use of the Blu-ray media. Many games will reprint the game on the media for optimization purposes, fill the game with international voice overs for all countries or, otherwise, stuff the media with something that will serve a useful purpose. Sony has near-future-proofed their device by giving game developers years of growth in terms of utilizing the Blu-ray capacity.
Microsoft chose to take the smaller old-style DVD format for games and media. Adding the HD-DVD didn’t add a large deal of risk because, as we saw, they can discontinue the model and not change their core gaming demographic. We still laughed a bit at them, but that was where it ended. Bach also said that it’s not really a great economic time to push a new 360 SKU on potential customers with additional cost just for Blu-ray movies playback.
They could add Blu-ray game development support as well but that would just alienate the “28 million Xboxes” they have already shipped.
“OK, let me get this straight: I’m going to add something to the product that’s going to raise the cost, which means the price goes up, consumers aren’t asking for it, and by the way, my game developers can’t use it.” (gamespot)
Of course, the first thing that came to our mind was “well, you did it for HD-DVD, how is Blu-ray different?” The key areas we can think of really come down to Blu-ray is a Sony technology and they are a direct competitor and, to top it off, HD-DVD allowed them to fight against the PS3 at the media level of the industry. They minimized the risk by making the product a secondary add-on device and, if HD-DVD had won, they’d have the winning format already under production (still not for games).
It seems Microsoft has changed their battle plans a little. They started out talking up the media aspects of the 360, using Media Center, renting movies and TV shows and had the HD-DVD as a subproduct. Today, they’re investing in Netflix for media and everything else favors the games.
Which is fine, we like games.
Only 13.4% of gamers are playing the Wii even though it’s the hottest selling console on the market, showing the fury of the casual gamer it seems. It’s trendy to own a Wii but it’s not trendy to play it; it would be interesting to see how much of the 13.4% is Wii Sports.
Microsoft’s fast to push out their press release, probably hoping to overshadow any reports Sony may be releasing for sales numbers. At this point, we’ll have to believe their press release as fact until someone proves it otherwise; Microsoft would hate to be caught in a lie. Unfortunately, NPD figures aren’t collected in Europe so we have to wait for all the other metric gathering companies to release final December 2007 figures.
Sony takes a 
Microsoft Game Studio’s producer Phil Spencer said:
Famitsu Magazine is reporting the Nintendo console, Wii, has managed to sell 7-million units in Japan. This is roughly three times the number of Sony’s PlayStation 3, the console with superior graphics and power.
The most important feature we’ve found with the new console software is the addition of Netflix. The ability to play software in the “Instant Queue” is excellent, fast and done with high quality. If you have children this may be one of the must-have product features; add a ton of family movies to the Netflix Instant Queue and your children will have hours of entertainment.
Gamers around the world are going to feel the pain in the 2009 holiday season after the economy shakes apart many great development studios. Electronic Arts feels the pain of being a public company as their investors complain about lackluster revenue, THQ deals with closing studios to extend their runway and other firms will lose more headcount in the coming months.
Are you one of those that have a diskless (or low flash disk) based Xbox 360? We’ve been wondering, ourselves, what Microsoft was going to do to “fix” the fact that the upcoming Fall Update is going to require 128MB of disk space.