Universal to go multiformat confirmed?

[fiasco8]

Originally Posted by PhoenixKfz

Changed thread title as Universal isnt "dropping" HD DVD they are just going multiformat.

Fail. The old title attracts more angst. :|

[Icemage]

Originally Posted by Descendency

It would have been DOA, but not for those reasons. First, the HD-DVD vs BluRay is far over-rated. Sure, BluRay is a superior technology, but it isn't a landslide by any means (like DVD vs CD) nor is it really that major of a factor in terms of gaming (Very few games legitimately push the required disk space).

Agreed. My point here, though, was that, as it stands, the Xbox 360's current DVD 12x drive is around ~1.5 times faster than the PS3's Bluray 2x drive. Had they gone with an HD DVD drive, that speed advantage goes in the other direction, with an HD DVD drive having only a little over 1/2 of the speed of a Blu-ray drive.

It would have lost out to a popular brand, Playstation, because of name recognition. Many of the PS2 owners looking to upgrade to HD would have bypassed the 360 (more so than what is currently).

Precisely.

As far as the logistics are concerned, how many HD-DVD drives were available at launch? I think I agree with you mainly because I don't think HD disk drives were completely ready for either launch (PS3 or Xbox) and that the format got pushed out because they "needed" it. Honestly, it is starting to become a viable format to trust (HD-DVD can be trusted to be dead now, IF this is true).

As I mentioned earlier, I'm pretty sure the initial production run on the first generation Toshiba units was very small. All I remember from that time period was that Toshiba's total unit count for HD DVD was somewhere around 60K-100K for calendar 2006, and that they had supply problems of some sort that delayed the arrival of their second generation HD-A2 unit until after Christmas 2006 (though they had some Xbox 360 add-ons available at that point - again, not many, but some).

Still not nearly the amount of hardware that Microsoft would have needed to put an HD DVD drive into the Xbox 360, though. One might argue that they would have put a greater emphasis on production volumes if it had become the main 360 drive, but that's wandering out even further in the land of speculation.

[CaptainMarbles]

Well my opinion of Sony has gone up. We can bad mouth them all we want for being idiots but they are going to make way more money off blu ray than gameing anyway so I guess it turns out they will get the last laugh,