Despite long-standing rumors that Blu-ray compatibility would be coming to the Xbox 360 in some way, shape or form, Microsoft man Robbie Bach claims that customersdon’t really care for it, reinforcing that the company has “no plans” to support the disc format.
“It’s not a feature we get a ton of requests for,” claimed the entertainment and devices boss.“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.”
Of course, that might just be because the Xbox 360 has a lot of other, more crucial problems that come way, way ahead of Blu-ray, but I’m sure Bach wouldn’t (publicly) agree with me on that.
“The second thing is, from a technical perspective, it doesn’t help us in the core of what Xbox does, which is in gaming,” he continued.“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.”
Bach also said that it simply costs a lot of money to support Blu-ray, something which just wouldn’t make sense for the limited use Blu-ray could logically have right now. After dismissing Blu-ray, the MS man suggested an even better way to get HD TV and movies on the 360, bigging up the Netflix video-on-demand service.
Despite the fact that Bach is bemused by “actual twelve-year-old girls,” he makes fair points all around. Supporting a whole new format this far into a console’s lifespan is not financially wise. I am pretty sure we’ll see more embracing of Blu-ray in the next generation, but it’s a stupid idea right now, as the Sega CD could personally attest.
