W29 said: DVD's is still thrashing the hell out of HD-DVD and Blu-ray. The format is still undecided as of Tuesday September 25, 2007.

I still say the format has been decided.  DVD and that even when HDTV adoption rates are near 100% unless they stop making DVDS or Blu-Ray comes down in price to equal with DVD people will stick with DVD.

I mean think about how long it took for people to accept DVD which, aside from looking better offered tons of features that made it better then VHS.

Blu-Ray(or HD-DVD) isn't going to be the next DVD.  It's going to be the next "Laserdisc".

@ starcraft

What do you mean by that? A 2-speed Blu-Ray drive does not equal the speed of a 2-speed DVD drive.

The PS3 Blu-Ray drive reads data faster (9MB/s) than the XBox 360's DVD drive on average can for dual-layer DVD discs (4.125 to 10.8 MB/s).

@ W92

What did you expect? DVD is a well established standard, it's not like DVD pushed VHS video out of the market within a 1 or 2 years after the format launched. Actually the adoption of high definition formats seems to be taken place at a higher pace than was the case with regard to DVD.

@ Borkachev

Facts require hard evidence, else it's just speculation or a personal opinion. Can you provide this?

Consumers can surely benefit from the inclusion of a Blu-Ray drive, for instance the discs are pretty much scratch resistant, allows the user to playback high definition Blu-Ray movie format movies as well and enables game designers to make fewer sacrifices while designing new games.



I will go into some more depth with regard to this one, because I think it's a common misconception.

First of game designers have multiple reasons to keep the amount of discs to a minimum, one is additional cost but not only with regard to the media itself, game design gets more complicated when your game spans multiple discs.

People often cite Blue Dragon as the first XBox 360 game to span multiple discs (3 of them). But please note Blue Dragon is a very Linear RPG/adventure, basically the simplest kind of game to span on multiple discs as developers may decide not to re-use game assets from earlier parts of the game, like textures and sounds (enemies, surroundings such as vegetation, etc), for other types of games like platformers, racing games, 3D shooters, etc this is usually a far more desirable approach. But even in a very Linear game you may require a user to come back to previously visited locations to finish a task (like in for example God of War or many traditional adventure games). If this would mean yet another disc swap, I think many developers will just make gaming sacrifices to work around the need for this disc swapping or maybe multiply data on the other discs (and thus the space available on 6 dual layer DVDs no longer equals the amount of data which is possible to store on a single Blu-Ray disc).



For the short run so far, the XBox 360 can keep up. Epic games like God of War take up to 3 years to develop. Second generation PS3 games like Ratchet and Clank Future (a platformer!) seem to benefit a lot already from the additional storage space.



The PS3 will still be around in a few years and Blu-Ray technology will then be cheaper than would otherwise have been the case if the PS3 didn't launch with a Blu-Ray drive. An external Blu-Ray drive is far less elegant and game designers will take into account the huge PS3 userbase which doesn't own one, just like XBox 360 game designers take into account the lack of a harddrive for a big part of the current XBox 360 userbase.

MikeB said: The PS3 will still be around in a few years and Blu-Ray technology will then be cheaper than would otherwise have been the case if the PS3 didn't launch with a Blu-Ray drive.

@MikeB:

The PS3 might be around in a few years, but this generation is being decided NOW

@ Faxanadu

Wishful thinking? IMO the big battle for this generation has only just begun. I expect the PS3 to fight back like a Rocky Balboa, with games like Gran Turismo 5, Metal Gear Solid 4, Final Fantasy XIII and Killzone II!

MikeB said: @ Faxanadu The PS3 might be around in a few years, but this generation is being decided NOW Wishful thinking? IMO the big battle for this generation has only just begun. I expect the PS3 to fight back like a Rocky Balboa, with games like Gran Turismo 5, Metal Gear Solid 4, Final Fantasy XIII and Killzone II!

Watch how the release of Halo 3 impacts the sales of the XBox 360 over the next 4 weeks ... You'll see a large spike in sales this week followed by elevated sales for a couple of weeks and then sales will return to normal.

Sony would need to release a game of Halo 3's calibur every week for months to be able to build enough sustained momentium to catch up which simply won't happen; this generation is being decided now while the PS3 is on the sidelines in a Blu-Ray cheerleader outfit.

I think Halo 3 will especially have a profound impact in the US. For Japan I don't think it will perform much better than Gears of War did. I think Europe will probably take middleground, with the game having most impact in the UK.



I think lowering the price in coming years and their currently impressive games line-up will do a lot of good. Especially for Japan I expect major gains with the release of Gran Turismo 5, Final Fantasy XIII (& Versus XIII), Monster Hunter 3, White Knight Story and Metal Gear Solid 4.

I also think the PS3 versions of Biohazard 5 (Resident Evil 5), The Last Remnant, Shin Sangoku Musou 5 (Dynasty Warriors 6) and Devil May Cry 4 will have much greater impacts than the XBox 360 versions. This due to the games listed above being of greater importance and the XBox 360 and Microsoft having a rather bad reputation in Japan.