| o187em said: It will be able to play games. This will be no different that the original Xbox. The Xbox couldnt play DVD movies unless you purchased the DVD Controller, once the controller receiver was attached it could play Movies. BD-Movie playback will be software locked, once the purchase the unlock software you will be able to play BD-Movies. Sony knows that most of the people that buy the cheaper Slim will eventually buy the software upgrade to watch BD-Movies. But by doing it this way they will be able to better compete with the Xbox Arcade in price. |
For Sony it would save very little if they remove DVD/BR-movie capability but keep the BR drive. I doubt they would drop the price by $200 while saving probably $5. The BR-drive is expensive but capability to play movies is not very expensive. And anyone can buy HDMI cables for less than $5 so total saving would be around $10. Sure, some will buy movie capability but a lot of people don't. Also, some PS3 games are using same codecs for cutscenes as BR/DVD movies so they would have to pay for all codecs even if it couldn't play movies.
