Xbox 360 HD DVD drive given heave-ho by MS

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 24 February 2008 12:15

Opinion and Analysis

For those that say downloading will be the answer, while we agree, we believe that most consumers’ Internet speeds and download limits unlikely to have grown so much as to allow 25GB and 50GB downloads on a regular basis.

We think especially not when the Comcasts (US ISP) of the world are actively clamping down on high usage downloaders, whether the traffic is legitimate or of the p2p illegal files haring variery.

It would be fantastic if two years hence saw 500GB or even 1TB download caps and speeds of 100Mbps minimum, along with 1TB hard drives in games consoles the base minimum, but it just seems unlikely from where we are today, with some broadband providers still giving consumers less than 1GB of download per month - in 2008! God help consumers if ISPs are still so stingy in 2010.

Microsoft already made the ‘mistake’ once of not waiting for the HD DVD drive to be ready before releasing the Xbox 360, something that would have ensured millions of HD DVD equipped Xbox 360s in the hands of consumers, and millions of HD DVD players to combat the Blu-ray onslaught led by the PS3.

But it’s all ancient history now, as Microsoft nevertheless positions itself for download supremacy in games, movies and TV shows, while presumably working on the successor to the Xbox 360.

Surely the successor would come with a Blu-ray player or some form of copy-protected flash memory format in a range of sizes that could grow larger and larger, instead of being limited to 50GB as the current Blu-ray disc is.

This would benefit all those people that want to buy a game from the store, plug it in and start playing, instead of starting a download and waiting hours for it to arrive.

Until then, all we know is that Microsoft’s HD DVD drive is no more, destined either for the junk heap of history, or the auction piece on eBay sold at high prices in 20 years’ hence as still-working Betamax players are today.