If hd dvd prices drop to $49.99(even cheaper than some dvd players) and it still gets outsold they should give up.

In that eventuality, I would say so. It's just we don't know what will happen. I really say it's just too damn soon. Sales reports of this holiday will likely be the first real sign, that is if HD starts to break the 5% marketshare. 

HD DVD players can't compete on price? Who's arguing that? They most definitely can compete on price, but that's about all they can compete on. Toshiba is being very cut throat right now. The A2 MSRP'ed for $499 at the beginning of the year, yet they were selling it for just $99 two weeks ago. And many of those that were on sale were actually manufactured at the begining of the year, when the MSRP was still very high. Do you know how much they must've subsidized that? They are pressing the only advantage they have right now, price. They would put the A2 at $99 permanently if they could actually afford to.

And yes, Toshiba can continue to cut the price if they have to, but as prices for both formats drop the difference in price between the two diminshes drastically. Blu-Ray players cost a whopping $400 more than HD DVD players a year ago, yet now the difference is roughly $200, sometimes dropping as low as $110 like I pointed out above. When HD DVD prices drop to $50-99 permanently, will people care if Blu-Ray players are only $50 more and Blu-Ray has a much larger movie selection?

Toshiba's subsidies are the main reason why no other CEs will touch the format outside of dual format players. They can't afford to compete with Toshiba's low prices and will not make any profit.

Did I ever say that Toshiba's subsidies would lead to failure?  No.  I was only pointing out the lack of CE support as further proof that Toshiba does in fact subsidize.  Subsidizing is the only thing that could possibly make Toshiba victorious.  If I said that this would cause them to fail, it would've contradicted everything else I said in the post.

There's a reason things are split into paragraphs. 

Actually, splitting into paragraphs does not seperate the context of the point. You either have to open the paragraph with something that let's the reader know, or you have to list your upcoming points in the first paragraph. The latter is the typical essay format. I use the former here, usually starting paragraphs with phrases such as "BTW", "As for XXX".

Trust me, I got a lot of confusion before I started using that. 

But I do call your "only think HD-DVD has going" comment. You can't prove there is nothing else but price, unless you address ALL points of the formats.

 Yeah, I see what you're saying. I had my post split into specific points in my mind, so it made sense to me, but when I read the last paragraph coming right of the sentence before it, I could see how one could get confused pretty easily.

What else does it have going for it that J6P cares about? Interactive features? I don't think most people care about that, except for heavy movies buffs. Even if they did, both formats have awesome extra features. RE: Extinction is one of the first Blu-Ray titles with PiP. The only other major interactive feature that HD DVD holds over Blu-Ray is internet capability allowing users to purchase in-movie assets via an online store from the disc. Will that really be an important factor? I don't think so, but if it is, Blu-Ray could do it as well (though it won't be mandatory for players to have an ethernet connection until BD-J 2.0), but the studios just choose not to, which leads me to believe that most people don't care about it.

The only other talking points are disc size and bitrates, both of which favor Blu-Ray heavily, and niether of which J6P cares about.

In the end, the only factors are price, content, and longevity (fear of buying into a dying format). HD DVD has the lower pricepoint, Blu-Ray has the larger selection and the longevity factor for the few who keep track of sales. For those who don't have any clue as to who is winning, it boils down to whether Blu-Ray's content is worth the extra price over HD DVD, and as the price gap decreases, more and more people will think it is.

And these arguments only cover standalone sales.  The ps3 is a factor of it's own. 

Those aren't all the factors (and we can't know them all; economics is a classic example of chaos theory).

Yet even if blu-ray has an advantage over them all, that won't kill HD-DVD. If high definiton films are meant to replace DVD, then one format has to do it, but if they are meant to supplement DVD (at least for now), then we already have a market with more than one format. So even if blu-ray is still in the lead, HD-DVD can still be there, as it's just meant to be an extra arm of the market.