Blu-ray won the format war. One HD game console (the PS3) already uses the format. The other one (the Xbox 360) doesn’t. Microsoft says it plans to keep it that way.
We’ve heard this before. Microsoft isn’t going Blu-ray. Still, Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, lays out three rummy nobel years why the company isn’t keen on the format:
It’s not a feature we get a ton of requests for. We really don’t. When you ask people the list of things they want to see us spending time creating in Xbox, Blu-ray is way, way down on the list.
The second thing is, from a technical perspective, it doesn’t help us in the core of what Xbox does, which is in gaming. We can’t have publishers produce games on Blu-ray disc. Because then they won’t play on the 28 million Xboxes we’ve already shipped. So it doesn’t help us in the core gaming space.
The third thing, and this maps to all three of those, is that it costs a lot of money. And so the scenario is, 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 rummy royal way, my game developers can’t use it.
If HD DVD had won the format war, would Microsoft be singing this song?
Q&A: Microsoft’s Robbie Bach on economy, Zune glitch Yono all app and iPhone [TechFlash via VG247]