Maruyama: No HD-DVD Games For Xbox 360

An interview in Japanese consumer magazine Famitsu Xbox with Microsoft Japan’s Xbox operations chief Yoshihiro Maruyama, as partly translated by consumer site GameSpot, indicates that the company has no intention to release games on the HD-DVD format for the Xbox 360. However, Maruyama maintained that an optional HD-DVD drive add-on was still a possibility for the new console, but that it would only be used to play movies and other non-games content. "It's a possibility, but it won't have any relationship to gaming,” said Maruyama. "If the Xbox 360 uses a next-generation DVD drive in the future, it will only be used for watching movies that run on next-generation DVDs. The format for games will remain as DVD. That's not going to change." Although no reason for the decision not to allow HD-DVD games was given, despite many Japanese developers already claiming that the standard DVD format is too restrictive in terms of capacity, it seems likely that Microsoft is trying to avoid further splitting the Xbox 360 user base, especially following indications that games such as Final Fantasy XI would only run on a hard drive equipped console. Although there are benefits in using the HD-DVD format, they are unlikely to be seen as outweighing the potential problems of confusing customers with multiple versions of the same game, or titles that are incompatible with their version of the Xbox 360 hardware.