NEWS - Saturday, December 13, 2003
Proprietary Game Discs for Xbox 2
According to the ad, Microsoft’s Xbox team is seeking an engineer "to manage the design and development of the Xbox Game Disc for the next generation Xbox console", with the job description going on to mention anti-piracy as the first in a list of key factors for the new game disc specification. Although it’s possible that the role will simply involve devising a copy protection mechanism for games on existing DVD media, similar to that used by the current generation Xbox and the PlayStation 2, the description of the role hints strongly at the company developing a more proprietary format. Microsoft may be planning to follow in the footsteps of Nintendo, whose mini-DVD format which has been highly successful in preventing piracy on the GameCube. It’s widely expected, however, that whatever media the next Xbox console (codenamed ’Xenon’, apparently) uses will be the same size as DVD media, since the system will be expected to play back DVD movies and provide backwards compatibility with Xbox games.Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/
