Playstation 2 in 2nd place This Gen!

[joeorc]

daroamer said:

joeorc said:

daroamer said:

joeorc said:

daroamer said:

WilliamWatts said:

Reasonable said:

WilliamWatts said:

Sony probably cut the PS2's life short a year too soon. They probably ought to have released the PS3 in 2007!

Actually, if the strong push for HD DVD and the rushed release of the 360 hadn't forced their hand, I think the PS3 would have released later.  I don't think Sony had the initial production and costs where they really wanted it when they launched PS3, particularly in US and Japan.

The PS2 was selling fine and without the external factors they had no real need to launch when they did - and I doubt at the time they were really worried about the Wii, although of course with hindsight we know they should have been.

They probably figured all they had to do was show up to win. So why not take away the format war at the same time? :-p Though in any case I doubt that HD-DVD would have won even if the PS3 had been delayed. Sony's reputation with the PS2 and their own movie studios pretty much sealed that deal.

That's actually not true.  HD DVD was handily outselling Blu-ray until the launch of the PS3.

umm. no Blu-Ray had 3 year's worth of sales even before the HD DVD finaly hit the market. Blu-Ray was already on the market being sold to the consumer since apr 10 2003.

I'm sorry, what?

The first Blu-ray movies were released on June 20th, 2006, about 3 months after the first HD-DVD releases. 

Due to the ill advised use of the outdated MPEG-2 compression format, the same as DVD, the first batch of Blu-ray movies were widely considered to be of inferior quality to the early HD-DVD releases despite the greater bandwidth on the Blu-ray format.  The first 50gig dual layer Blu-ray wasn't released until Oct of that same year.

Due to the much higher price of the hardware and the lower quality of the movies HD-DVD was outselling Blu-ray by a factor of about 3-1 if I recall correctly.  The release of the PS3 was the catalyst that changed that with the PS3 being the cheapest available Blu-ray player for quite some time.

I lived through the format wars, I have a few hundred movies in both formats.  I remember it quite well. 

who said any thing about Movies!

The person I originally replied to.

I didn't realize the format war was predicated on Blu-ray burners, I could have sworn it was about HD movie formats.  Those burners would have be completely useless in playing Blu-ray movies when NONE WERE RELEASED.

NO IT'S NOT, THE POINT BEING BEFORE Even the first HD DVD optical drive was created, Blu-Ray was alreay on the market and was already selling with a Product.The Majority of optical drive manuf. all ready decided to support Blu-Ray because it was already on the market and it worked. HD DVD was too late to the Party. with or Without The PS3 Blu-ray was going to win, The PS3 just sped up the Time Table, Toshiba, and Microsoft knew even than that HD DVD was not going to win. They did it to slow the adoption of Blu-Ray.