Doctor Glyndwr wrote:
Licensing fees aren't paid to Sony, they are paid to the Blu-Ray forum; Sony is a founding member of that but only one amongst many. This is exactly the same as for DVD playback licensing.
Yes but a cut of the total fee they would pay would go back to Sony (apologies i'm not suggesting they pay Sony directly but pay the consortium of which Microsoft is not a part but Sony is)
Grim... wrote:
zaphod79 wrote:
If Microsoft put a BR player in then they would need to pay a fee to Sony for each console made , however as an example the disks for the Wii U are 'similar' to Bluray (30 - 40 gigs a disk?) but are not actually Bluray disks so they do not need to pay that fee.
But I can't watch a BluRay movie on it, right? That's a reason lots of my friends went for the PS3.
The Wii-U will not play bluray disks , in the same way the Wii (without hacking it) will not play DVD disks (because Nintendo did not pay the licensing fee to allow DVD playback)
Bamba wrote:
The key thing here though is that most people aren't going back to scratch. Earlier in your post you mentioned that a selling point of the Xbox at the beginning of the last generation was the migration of your friends lists so I'm not sure why you don't think that will matter this time round?
It will be a factor
Bamba wrote:
Indeed the lock-in could be even more compelling depending on the backwards compatibility. If either platform can promise some amount of backwards compatibility then, in this age of XBLA/PSN, it's surely even less likely than last generation that people will move from one side to the other?
Yes *if* that happens , however given the way that Sony have monetized their back catalog on the PS3 (after binning the initial backward compatibility) and that Microsoft 'sell' original Xbox games on their service I think its less likely that you'll get it in the next consoles by simply putting a disk in instead they will sell it to you in some way.
Bamba wrote:
Unrelatedly: I don't think for a second MS will make the mistake of not having Bluray playback capabilities in their next console as it would be to throw a massive selling point under a bus.
I dont think they will and they will just go for streaming I'm not convinced that allowing users to play their bluray disks in the machine is that much of an advantage for Microsoft at this point (if they were that serious would they not have tried to do something similar to their HD-DVD system for bluray a few years ago when it would have potentially shut down one of the selling points of the PS3?)
I'm slowly getting rid of all the blurays / dvd's I have and i'm not buying new ones - in the same way that i no longer buy music cd's - everythings going to be digital so if the next consoles have a high density drive then its not a selling point for me that one plays blurays and the other does not (although I understand it will be a selling point for others)