Worst Mistakes in Gaming

[MontanaHatchet]

Bobbuffalo said:

Famine said:

Onimusha12 said:
Were Blu-Ray's small benefits to gaming worth seeing the PS3 destroyed at launch and losing the lion share of its once treasured third party exclusivity to the 360 and Wii? Whether its a good choice or not for gaming, it severly damaged the PS3 and halted the momentum of the Sony brand thus was a huge mistake.

I suppose UMD isn't that high, but I was trying to round out a list.

Still too early to say if Blu-ray was indeed a thorn to the PS3. People also thought DVD playback on the PS2 was a mistake, with quite a brouhaha. People were buying PS2s as a cheap DVD player rather than a gaming machine.

Hasn't that been the case for PS3: With hardware being sold, but not a significant software attach rate to boot?

Is a very different case. When the PS2 appeared, the DVD format was growing and starting to replace VHS's. The costs were reducing and it was the format of the future and people wanted to use them. The PS2 came to fill a "necessity" on those days and that's why the DVD format helped the PS2.

Blu ray is not filling any necesity. DVD's are very far from becoming obsolete and Blu ray feels more like a "luxury" than a necessity. For taking advantage of the Blu ray you need a HD TV and a 7.1 home theatre. Although HD-DVD died, Blu rays weren't growth bigger and is not helping the PS3 at all, because of the costs for manufacture them.

 

If memory serves, it took until 2003 for DVDs to actually become bigger than VHSs. That was 3 years after the PS2 launched, and it had sold quite an impressive amount by that time. While the PS3 won't sell anymore near that amount in the same time frame, it won't stop the growth of Blu-ray.

One thing you have to remember is that DVD was around since 1995, 8 years before it overtook VHS. Blu-ray has many years to grow. Besides, the PS3 is one of the cheapest Blu-ray players on the market, and yet it's still undertracking the PS2 by a large amount. That either means that their sales were almost entirely dependent on the popularity of the format, or, more likely, it depends on which system had more games and was more popular.

I lost my train of thought, so I'll stop there.