It’s funny, despite the affordability of excellent Blu-Ray players, the primary reason people endorse the PS3 is its ability to play High-Def movies and hold large games on only one disk. And maybe your don’t remember this, but when when the HD DVD format imploded, the Xbox 360 was predicted to quickly fold against the PS3…yet here we are almost two years later and Microsoft seems to have won the battle against Sony (thus far).

I think it’s incredible that in the absence of a high capacity disk solution, the Xbox 360 has admirably held on to gamer support. Sure we need to swap 3 disks to play Final Fantasy XIII on the Xbox, but gamers don’t seem to mind. In fact, the more disk the better. Gamers get the impression that they are getting more this way for their cash.

In fact, Aaron Greenberg, Microsoft’s director of Microsoft product management believes that their market share has benefited from the absence of Blu-Ray.

“Sony bet on the physical disc, and there are costs associated with that…The fact that we’re able to offer a console starting at $199 is a benefit of not being burdened with that cost.”

Greenberg then went on to point out that the Xbox has nearly twice the install base of the PS3…

“For us, our bet was on digital distribution, that was the future — the ability to [play] 1080p movies with no disc, no download required; we have the largest movie and TV library, the largest HD library of any console.”

Interestingly, Microsoft has publicly stated that said that they have no interest in bringing a Blu-ray drive to the 360. I think that they do, but why endorse something you won’t add anyway. All things considered, its a safe bet that the next Xbox console will go Blu. They have to with the new 3D blu ray format and games taking up more and more space. I don’t know about you, but I can’t afford to download a 20-50GB game install.

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