It's been quite a while since the formats war ended with Blu-ray's triumph, but Microsoft didn't offer a Blu-ray drive for Xbox 360 yet. Today, Microsoft's president of Entertainment & Devices Division Robbie Bach explained the company's reasoning behind that.
After asserting that Microsoft has no plans for Xbox 360 Blu-ray drive any time soon, Bach laid out 3 reasons for this decision.
"It's not a feature we get a ton of requests for. We really don't," he said. "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," he added. "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," Bach concluded. "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 way, my game developers can't use it."
