Microsoft UK boss Neil Thompson has raised his voice over the inclusion of Blu-ray functionality in the PS3, stating he feels it offers no tactical advantage over Xbox 360.

Speaking to Gamesindustry.biz, Thompson stated "Do I want to make people pay £200 extra for a machine with discs that have storage space I don’t need? My answer’s no, I don’t need to do that today."

"And I don’t think I’m going to need to do that for quite a while."

Elaborating, Thompson explained that the Xbox 360 offers consumers a more flexible approach to new technology, given the fact it allows users to upgrade their machine when they see fit, an aspect that he feels will be a key factor in the machines success.

"I’m not sure the market has moved to high definition [movies] yet”, he noted.

"And if and when it does, then the way that we’ve constructed the offering we’ve made means we’ll be able to go whichever way we want."

Moving on, Thompson described that the Xbox 360s “nimble” hardware would allow it to meet any requirements needed for developers to produce software for the system, arguing that the machine could just as easily match anything PS3 could produce.

Indeed, Thompson feels that compression techniques and the ability to download content online through Xbox Live would rectify any possible issues over disk storage in the future.

"I’d be really surprised if technologically, and we’re a software company, we couldn’t get to a situation where we can deliver whatever content we need to," he observed.

"This is about the architecture of the hardware. With the PS3 you’ve got a big, heavy truck that requires a big, heavy engine. With Xbox you’ve got a much more nimble box that uses software in the architecture of the box in a much more nimble way."

Concluding, he added “That’s the difference between us and PlayStation - we didn’t have a need to develop a really complicated engine to get Blu-ray players into the market. We wanted to deliver HD gaming. Judge us on what we’ve done."