I only Just figured it out.. duh

[What'sHD]

We all know the issues that dvd9 imposes on games of this gen, especially in the latter half of the console-lifecycle.

But, if one steps back, there was nothing else MS could have done. Lets see the choices they had wrt disc-format for games back in the day when designing the 360:

1. BD: Non-starter. That would just have handed sony the crown and helped BD win the coming format war, thanks to the economies of scale from game discs plus the psychological factor of their support.

2. HD-DVD: Even now, they have no wish to support hd-dvd as a format in their consoles, even just for movies.

That choice was def. not viable back then for the 360 cos it would have added cost to it, delayed launch and if hd-dvd lost the movie-format war (which I suspect MS now knows will happen eventually), 360 would have been the Only CE hardware using hd-dvd discs.. in the world. Not a good situation to be in.

So, that left DVD9. It was not a choice as much as it was a lack of options.

My prediction is xbox3 will be out/announced by 2009, using the winner of the format war (BD).

Then, we will hear platitudes from MS about how they welcome the chance to use the capabilities of the BD format and how great BD50 is as a piece of "science fiction", i mean technology

Hell, the next xbox will prob play BD movies.