Xbox 360 games lose the gloss?

News filtering through the games industry reveals that Microsoft has effectively dropped the need for Xbox 360 titles to be made in hi-definition.

Microsoft has required that Xbox 360 game developers work at 720p resolution ever since 2005. That’s all very nice for gamers with HD tellies and it’s certainly good PR for Microsoft and their next-gen console. Things are slightly trickier for developers, though – especially when they’re trying to push speedy frame-rates at the same time.

Such concerns may well be behind Microsoft’s new decision. A little leeway for developers to make games in lower definition wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing either – Halo 3, for instance, was produced at a lower resolution and then upscaled to 720p, and nobody complained about that for too long. Meanwhile it seems that very few big releases are able to marry high-speed and high-definition. Take Gear of War 2: it boasts 1080p visuals on the box, but the game itself actually upscales from 720p in order to be compatible with 1080p screens, while everything jogs along at a modest 30 frames per second. Did any of that ruin the experience for you?

So the apparent drop in image quality doesn’t have to mean shoddy-looking games for Xbox 360 from now on. If anything it might actually mean faster and smoother running software. Possibly even cheaper too, if it means that games don’t take as long to produce. Well, there’s no harm in dreaming...