MikeB on 24 August 2007
@ rocketpig
would much rather have had the ability to buy a PS3 sans Blu-ray for $400 and then in 2008 or 2009, purchase a Blu-ray/HD-DVD player(s) for $150 or less.
I think many people are misinformed by the media and maybe some XBox 360 fans. Blu-Ray in the PS3 is very desirable as a games media, even multi-platform games developers have complained about the lack on storage available on DVD for the XBox 360. And with regard to the PS3 we are talking about games which will deliver 1080p visuals combined with 7.1 quality audio and probably for Sony games often include regional localizations. That's going to use up huge amounts of data, developers think 50 GB will even be limiting for the future. Some games won't be suited to span over multiple discs.
And in addition to the storage benefit, have you read the thousands of XBox 360 user complaints of having trouble with scratched discs (even European investigations and such)? Well, that's pretty much a non-issue with protected Blu-Ray discs, also the sustained (predictable) reading speed of Blu-Ray players can potentially aid software development.
And judging by sales of the PS3, it's painfully obvious that I'm not the only one who thinks this way.
According to VGChartz data the PS3 outperformed the XBox 360 the last month despite a higher entry price. And this is actually quite extra-ordinary as XBox 360 sales should accelerate considerably for the console's second year on the market (bigger library games available, games pushing the hardware better, etc).
XBox 360 vs Playstation sales for the last 4 weeks according to VGChartz:
29 July:
1) PS3 - 106,760
2) PS2 - 102,835
3) X360 - 61,762
4/5 August:
1) PS2 - 99,791
2) PS3 - 99,126
2) X360 - 61,899
11/12 August
1) PS2 - 100,126
2) PS3 - 99,026
3) X360 - 78, 441 (North American price drop at end of week)
18/19 August
1) PS2 - 102,289
2) PS3 - 97,183
3) X360 - 85,533
