Clarifying his CES speech,
Peter Moore reaffirmed that the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on will be used for playing high-definition movies, and not to
distribute games. He told GameSpot, "Right now it's focused purely on movie playback. Think of the drive as
something that lets you play high-definition movies on the Xbox 360... If you want to watch HD-DVD movies and if you
own an Xbox 360, there will be no reason for you to go out and buy another player."During his speech he notably specified "movies", and now they are trying to reinforce that message; however, there are still ambiguity in his statement. "Right now"? Certainly they have no interest in promising not to do something, and they want to keep their options available. But they know that splintering the format could have very negative consequences.
Luckily he doesn't think it should be necessary: "Our developers are very comfortable with the [Xbox 360's] storage options--I think they're utilizing Xbox Live very creatively, and the hard drive, we have a very strong attach rate for the hard drive." He also doesn't want to offer a 360 with HD DVD built-in: "If you actually built a HD-DVD new Xbox 360, that fragments [the installation base] even further. So the idea of having an external peripheral is far better to keep the user base consistent rather than build yet another Xbox 360 that has HD-DVD built in."
