The week after the announcement? Blu-ray players outsold HD DVD players more than 12 to 1.
Believe it or not, even though I'm a PS3 owner I don't feel I have a horse in this race. My setup is dedicated exclusively to games -- it would be a terrible place to watch movies. I do have one Blu Ray disc, RoboCop, but other than that I still watch movies solely on DVD (in the living room, where we still have an SDTV). If HD-DVD were to become the dominant format, I'd be happy enough to adopt it when the time comes. All the same to me.
And yet, what's interesting is that we may eventually have to admit that Sony knew what they were doing all along. This would be a paradigm shift akin to discovering that the earth revolves around the sun, but you can't argue with hard numbers, unless you're a Republican politician. Their strategy from the start was to leverage the PlayStation brand as a Trojan horse in order to establish their high-definition media format media format globally. They took a bath on the hardware. They took a drubbing from the online gaming community. And now, it seems, they're going to take us all to the cleaners.
Well good for them, I say. It was a ballsy strategy that, unbelievably, is going to pay off. That's why they're Sony, and we're not.
2 comments:
I don't know, I feel like it validated their strategy to the extent that their strategy was to trade excellence in the gaming market for dominance of a movie format. If that's a victory in consumers' eyes, then hooray. I personally find it to be a frustrating cash-in of the Playstation brand, and a sign that Sony is not trustworthy in the long-term to do right by their customers.
I suppose they deserve a win after The Great Betamax Fiasco.
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