Shane Kim, (Microsoft's corporate vice president of Strategy and Business Development in its entertainment business) has said - about as categorically as anyone in the games industry ever will - that Blu-ray will not come to the Xbox 360. He even used the word 'categorically'!

Speaking to Forbes, Kim said, "I can categorically say that we're not working on a Blu-Ray player for Xbox 360." Categorically! SPOnG is floored.

Except... Kim did leave himself a teensy bit of wiggle room. He went on to say, "To my knowledge, we don't have any intent to do that." To his knowledge? As corporate vice president of Strategy, if Microsoft had any plans to incorporate a Blu-ray player into the 360 now that HD-DVD is officially dead, you would expect Kim to know. Unless, of course, some black ops division of Microsoft that operates 60 levels above Kim's head is working on such a project and keeping him out of the loop to maintain plausible deniability.

None of that is to say, of course, that a third party could not be working on an external Blu-ray drive for the Xbox 360.

Rumour and speculation that Microsoft would in some way bring Blu-ray functionality to the 360 has been sloshing round the games industry by the vat-load ever since the high-def format war ended back in February.

Kim says, however, that Microsoft is more interested in pushing digitally-delivered content for attracting non-core users to the 360. The deal with Netflix that will give 360-owners to 10,000 movies and TV shows, announced on Monday, certainly supports that.

^{Source: Forbes}