Xbox Live will be offline, and you won't even be able to bitch about it because the official Xbox forums will be down as well. Be-masked Xbox spokesperson Major Nelson confirms that there will be no updates whatsoever to the service, especially not the Xbox Experience update due this fall, so quit bugging him about it. Zune, for its part, will lose Zune Social, the Zune Marketplace and the Zune.net forums, again with absolutely no new features when the service is back up and running. So, commenters, how are you going to deal with what I've just decided to name the Great Microsoft Service Outage of 2008? Read a book? Go to work? Not care because you've never even seen a Zune in real life? [Xbox Live's Major Nelson and Zune Insider]

There are prominent examples, for instance: Project Gotham Racing 3, one of the first games for the Xbox 360. There the load times have been very long; those are going to get reduced immensely. Recent games are already optimized; there the gain is relatively small.

New games will see less of a benefit because related game information is written to DVDs in closer proximity. And just a factoid if you didn't know it—titles on the PS3 often double-write information, exploiting the space on Blu-ray discs to compensate for the slow tech. [Golem via GamersGlobe -Thanks Eric!]