Xbox 360 developers no longer need to ensure that their games run at 1280 x 720 resolution, claims David Jefferies of Black Rock Studio, who is currently working on ATV and Split/Second for Microsoft's console.

Develop Magazine reports that the requirement for developers to produce games that run at HD 720p resolution, which was a part of Microsoft's official terms and conditions, has now been dropped.

“We are making a trade-off and saying that the screen resolution is more important to us than the quality of the anti-aliasing,” said Jefferies to Develop magazine.

“This isn’t necessarily an entirely voluntary move because, until recently, Microsoft had a TCR insisting that games run at 1280×720 – providing you weren’t one of the lucky ones like Halo, who got it waived and ran at 1152×640, that is,” he said. “It’s is for this reason that Microsoft recently retired the TCR insisting on 1280×720. Now we are free to make the trade-off between resolution and image quality as we see fit.”

The change of policy comes following recent surveys which uncovered that the majority of Xbox 360 gamers don't have HDTV's, and that many of the LCD television in the home run at a resolution of 1366x768, meaning images were up-scaled.

The scrapping of the rule should mean that developers will now be able to concentrate on getting better graphical quality from lower resolutions.

Let us know your thoughts in the HEXUS.community forums.