Xbox 360 Blu-ray Rumors: The Nail in the Coffin?

Actually there is a simple technical reason while we'll never see Blu-Ray in the 360 (at least unless Blu Ray drives change). There's a big difference in the read speed and capabilities between a Blu Ray and a DVD laser. Blu Ray players reading DVD movies is one thing. But putting a Blu Ray into a 360 hobbbles the 360 because the 360 would have to read game data at current Blu Ray speeds (slower) and at constant rates (a problem for data this is spread across different paerts of a disc). The end result of putting a Blu Ray drive in a 360 would be to require 360 games to have mandatory installs and it would require refactoring all existing games. This is NOT trivial. Games are made with the specs of the DVD drive in mind for reading data. Microsoft cannot change this midstream in the consoles life.

Here's an article that inadvertently touches on this issue by trying to explain why some PS3 games require Hard Drive installs. The short, simple answer is that if the game requires a hard drive install it was likely developed as if the dev studio was making the game for a DVD drive and then they had the hard realities of the high storage space but inflexible read speed and slower speed of the Blu Ray drive.

http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/04/01/the-mystery-behind-playstation-3s-sometimes-mandatory-installations-as-far-as-we-know/

"The issue arises from differences in the reading techniques of DVD and Blu-ray. By nature, the outer and inner parts of a disc move at different speeds while a disc is spinning, regardless of format (CD, DVD, Blu-ray, HD-DVD, etc.). While DVD drives can read data at those differing speeds, Blu-ray reads at one speed. Combine that with the extremely large size of Blu-ray discs, and simply dumping existing DVD data onto a Blu-ray disc will inevitably result in longer load times.

Installations are a way around this issue."