[insane_cobra]

Originally Posted by SoccerDude28

I think you are exaggerating the difference in price between the 2. Blu-Ray will be more expensive, but the numbers you used seem highly exaggerated to me.5.99 for a blu-ray DVD? Come on now.

No, that price is for standard DVDs with TDK's protective coating applied, Blu-ray discs would cost even more. However, the CNET article those prices were taken from is dated November 17, 2004 so they're definitely down by now. Still, everyone's predicting Blu-ray discs would be rather expensive at first.

Plus quality costs money with blu-rays providing Double the storage, and a more durable disk that won't be unusable because of a simple scratch.

You know, I'm not sure games will need that kind of storage. MS are not even going with HD-DVDs, they're using simple dual layer DVDs and I don't believe they haven't conducted thorough case studies before going with that solution. Nine gigs is a lot of space and both Xbox 360 and PS3 are very powerful machines so more efficient methods of compression can be used. It might become too tight in 2-3 years, but I can certainly live with games coming on 2 DVDs, I doubt this gen games will ever require more.

Some people are concerned about huge open ended games coming on 2 discs. As you can theoretically choose to go anywhere in any given moment, there could be a lot of disc swapping involved. Maybe. But think about this: In 2-3 years the winner of the format wars will probably be known. External HD-DVD (or Blu-ray or whatever) drives for Xbox 360 will already become quite cheap, MS might even start including them in Premium packages. So almost everyone will have one or be able to afford one. Even if MS decides to stick with dual layer DVDs till the end, most everyone would have 2 drives: one in their Xbox 360 and one external. So you'd just pop one DVD in your console and one in your external drive - voila!

As far as advantages go, DELL and HP, 2 of the biggest PC manufacturers in the US are supporting Blu-Ray.

I don't doubt Blu-ray discs will be used for data storage on PCs (well, maybe not - we have dual layer DVD burners for quite some time now, but dual layer DVDs are still too expensive), but it's not that clear which format will prevail in the battle for movie distribution.

You want movie studios, how about Sony itself?

Of course, but there are also many big studios supporting HD-DVD so it's still not clear who will win. One thing is certain, most people will stick with DVDs until the winner is known, what with both Blu-ray and HD-DVD being quite useless without HDTV sets which are still too expensive for average joes.

And don't downplay the user base of the PS3 who won't have to shed another few hundred bucks on a new dvd player.

They will if they want full Blu-ray functionality. It's yet another hollow marketing trick, just like 1080p resolution at which hardly any PS3 game can perform well. Just like 2 HDMI outputs when PS3 can't even make full use of one. Just like support for 7 controllers when a single screen becomes crowded with only 4 people playing. Just like Cell's incredible processing power choked by a myriad of bottlenecks. Sony is playing the numbers game and it remains to be seen how many people will be naive enough to fall for it.