At least Shams has taken the time to actually read my thread's content, as have a coupld of others. At no point have I criticised the next-generation format Blu-Ray (though on a side note, Harvey Birdman is crazy if he thinks its winning a decisive victory anytime soon). What I have said is that including the Blu-Ray player in the PS3 was bad for the console.
This does not for a moment mean that it's inclusion was bad for Blu-Ray, just that it was bad for the console. So far all the player's inclusion has done is force up the price of the console and therefore massively reduce its sales. If anyone had told you the PS3 would have had under 6 million sales at this point BEFORE its price was announed, you would have called them crazy.
My fundamental point is that Blu-Ray has in no substantial way (other than relatively wealthy technophile purchases) assisted the PS3, but it has inhibited it. Also, if Blu-Ray does prevail over HD DVD, it will fall in price drastically, and very few casual consumers will purchase a PS3 as a Blu-Ray player. Better Blu-Ray players will come out, and even if they didn't, all early-adopting technophiles already have their PS3's.
ON the other hand, if Blu-Ray fails it will be catastrophic for the PS3. The player is incompatible with HD DVD, so all games that have already been printed could not be played if Sony switched formats. But if Sony did not switch formats the PS3 would simply be an overpriced console with no tangible benefits over its far cheaper rivals.
The one exception to this is the possibility that Sony could prove Blu-Ray has tangible and inescapable benefits for gaming, but to argue that they have proven this at this point is stupid. People will not pay hundreds of dollars extra to avoid switching disks every ten hours. The PS3's difficult hardware, limited RAM and small userbase are greatly diminishing the developers technical and financial resources, which would have been needed to produce longer games. Even Sony's first party games have so far been SHORTER than last generation. Sony claimed that Heavenly Sword had ten gigabytes of audio, but did it really matter when people like Rocketpig beat the game in 5hrs and 14min???
On top of this, the Blu-Ray player in the PS3 actually has a lower disc read speed than the 360's DVD player. Any claims that developers will now not bother with compression are ridiculous, as any smart developer does this to speed up resources, limit the load on their development servers, and reduce load times when the game is actually being played.
Finally, Leo-j made a snide comment about cd's changing the gaming industry's layout because they had more space but he is fundamentally incorrect. The reason most developers went with the PS1's Cd's rather than the N64's carts is because cd's were substantially cheaper......
DVDS=CHEAPER THAN BLU-RAY DISKS!!!!!
starcraft - Playing Games = FUN, Talking about Games = SERIOUS
