For all those passing welcomes and positive feedback thank you. Only one prob is that i have been a long time skulker around these parts, and while i don't post much (1st back in Jan/Feb i think), i only pipe up when i have something meaningful to add.
Sqrl - Having lurked in the background as a silent member for long enough (since the .org days) i am fully conversant with the other factors as i am sure most other here are. What inspired me to take the broader approach to the analysis was that after many a thread i had seen very few if any delve into the generic forces of mass consumer markets and their application to the videogame industry. What i might try and attempt is to draw the lines between the major factors affecting sales both from my first post and countless other threads attempting to analyse the sales situation. Such that the full bigger picture can be drawn. Difficulty of this is keeping it relatively short.
NJ5 - i agree that consumers don't care about storage, unless, the increase is percieved as significant. Your mum and dad shopper know that if they have a lot of files to back up on their home computer they will want to use DVDs as opposed to CDs. However what they see with the new HD formats is essentially a tweaked version of a DVD. It doesn't hit them as significant enough, unless they were to see HD side by side to SD so they don't really pay attention to the extra storage and advances made becuase it doesn't seem big enough, or justified enough to them. Product familiarity. Product familiarity is essentially what microsoft banks on year after year with windows. Linux has some fantastic OSs out there, that are free, legal, stable. Yet a free product can't seem to win against an otherwise expensive one, due to mass consumer familiarity with the later and an unwillingness to change without very good motivation to the former. This demonstrates part of the DVD to HD media format problem. People know DVD. Then they need to see the significant improvement, like the VHS -> DVD type.
Consider storage improvements over time for media (the fully sucessful ones); VHS -> DVD, and then thats it. Now look at it when you include all of the ones that tried to make it to mass market; Beta -> VHS -> LD -> VCD -> SVCD -> DVD. You can see evolution doesn't work, only revolution captures the mass market. Unfortunately as it currently stands i don't think BR or HDDVD are revolutionary enough to capture the mass market.
