Another day another slightly amusing interview snippet.

So apparently Microsoft are taking a hard stance on including a BluRay drive for the Xbox 360. To quote Kotaku quoting Robbie Bach:

"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 way, my game developers can’t use it.”

It’s a move I entirely agree with, but I can’t help but feel that they’d be cutting off this nose to spite their face if they didn’t end up offering it as an optional extra?

There's a clear and good reason not to include a BR drive as internal. It makes absolute sense, it'd further fracture the already slightly divided 360 user base (really, who buys an arcade?).

That said...

Stating that there isn’t demand sounds like conjecture and a little bit of FUD to me. Microsoft look like they’re using it to try bolster the movie download business for themselves.  If they felt that HD-DVD was demand worthy of a console addon when far less people were interested, then it only makes sense that there is more interest now that a format has been decided.  Avoiding BluRay out of interest makes it seem like backing HD-DVD was actually a move to undermine Sony.

The drives aren’t even so expensive to make these days (combined BR/HD-DVD/DVD-RW drive for about $99 / £50 on general sale), but there would be considerable development time porting a java virtual machine to the 360 (presuming one doesn’t already exist), and lets face it, Microsoft don’t have a great history with the JVM ;)

That said, I’m not aware of the market realities, but the critic in me would suggest they just don’t want to feed any licensing revenue into Sony and they’re more than just a little bit bitter.

That and they probably want to avoid inferiority comparisons when Sony go on their next “ah ah ah! we have Blu Ray included! that’s why we’re more expensive!” rant.

Personally? I’m not interested in a blu ray drive for me 360. They’ll likely use one on the next xbox as it’ll be the dominant format for high capacity disks by then, it’s only logical. Either that or they’re going to take one hell of a gamble on worldwide infrastructure. It’d be a fun bold move but probably one that’d cripple them as much as choosing BR crippled Sony for the first half of this generation. Not exactly a good business move.

At least they’re saying no categorically.