Xbox 360 will be blessed with a new interesting accessory, an external HD DVD player we’ve reported about at numerous occasions. We’ve heard rumors about Microsoft wanting to sell Xbox 360 and the HD DVD player as a package and this sounds like a logical move considering PlayStation 3 and its integrated support for Blu-ray. Earlier on Microsoft has been against an integrated HD DVD player and this may sound like the smart thing to do considering the increased production costs and the fact that game developers will most likely not use HD DVD media when millions of Xbox 360s have been sold without HD DVD support.
Now new rumors have appeared that says that Microsoft will indeed launch a Xbox 360 with an integrated HD DVD player, and will do so already during the first quarter of 2007. We’ve been speculating about this to see what Microsoft might have to gain from this.
“Microsoft has started designing a new-generation of Xbox 360’s equipped with an internal HD-DVD drive and is selecting manufacturers in Taiwan to build the drive, according to sources in Taiwan’s optical disc drive (ODD) industry.”
With integrated support for HD DVD they managed to remove one of PlayStation 3’s trumps and even if the external HD DVD player has some effect it is far from optimal. In the long it should be cheaper to integrate the HD DVD player instead of selling external units with extensive production costs.
Microsoft would then start to phase out its DVD versions of Xbox 360, but this will most likely take a few years, if it will ever happen, to be able to keep the prices down on the budget versions. Even if an integrated HD DVD player would make it more attractive for game developers to launch games on HD DVD media they are still tied to the millions of customer who don’t have HD DVD support. This means that in best case scenario there will be both a DVD and a HD DVD version of the game. A possible solution as we’ve seen similar things on the PC game market.
Even if this information is unofficial we can’t really see why Microsoft wouldn’t want to go for a HD DVD version of Xbox 360, as long as they don’t fogrget their initial followers the transition should be rather painfree.
