It wouldn't play any of these PS3 games I have.

PS3 fanboys would seem smarter

Microsoft would be in third and HD DVD would be the standard hi def optical format.

Well even if they sold 10M more consoles I doubt if it would be worth the bill for losing format war against HD-DVD.

Hrm... if it launched without a BR drive, it would be in second place, though it and the 360 would be pretty much neck-and-neck. Its lead is kept by peoples' familiarity with the Playstation brand, despite the cheaper 360 pricing. Which brings me to the price of the PS3: it would have launched at $399 (£249 / ¥44800 / €299), and had its 1 price cut to $299 (£199 / ¥34800 / €249).

However, Sony as a corporation would still be in a similar boat. Yes, their gaming division would be better, but I think the battle with HDDVD would either still be going on, or had both declared losers. (There was far too much movie studio support on BR for HDDVD to just win.) If the battle was still going on, the profits from the gaming division would be used in fighting the hi-def war, or if it were over, the electronics department would have an even larger loss to post. This is the way I think it would have gone, too- public disinterest would cause both formats to fail. I won't claim that the PS3 did nothing for the BR format as is, but some electronics companies could see the PS3 in the same light as Toshiba's players: why make our own, if there's a subsidized player on the market?

So either way, the discussions on Sony being doomed would still be here. *sighs*

I don't know why people are assuming HD-DVD would win. All it would have done would be to force more competition in the standalone realm; lower prices, more features and competition, and the formats battling on their own merits. Is everyone who is saying Blu-Ray would have lost also saying that Blu-Ray was worse than HD-DVD? Because even HD-DVD was too expensive for the mainstream at that point, so it would still have been a battle over the technophiles, which I am not so confident HD-DVD would have won...

 This.

HDDVD would have won because...

- HD DVD sold much more standalone player than bluray once you subtract PS3.

- HD DVD had both the DVD and HD DVD copy on one disk so customers could have gotten the HD DVD copy even if they had only the DVD player

- HD DVD were cheaper to make as they are the same size as DVDs and the manufacturers didn't have to change the size of the machines used to press the damn things

- Finally, players and movies wee slightly cheaper on HDDVD.

I think there would have been at least 40 million PS3s sold by now and 360 would have sold much less than it has.