YAVGP

Yes, it's time for Yet Another Video Game Post

This time up? The Console Wars! Or possibly more objectively but taking far longer to absorb, the Console War.

So what's new that I want to talk about? The fundamental victory of the Playstation 3 regardless of what sales figures say. What victory? Didn't you hear the OTHER war ended. The war of formats obviously!

In case you've been living under a metaphorical rock (at least with respect to mainstream electronics), all you early adopters of the HD-DVD format declaring that the extra numerous gigabytes on the Blu-ray discs didn't interest you since you had your slightly more-like alphabet soup format(s, it was actually a slew of them that were similar yet slightly different, well I assume they were, they had different 3-letter abbreviations at least) already supported a whopping 4 months earlier.

As of a month and a week ago, Toshiba pulled out of the format war with a slight bow scuttling off to have "collaborative relations" with the companies it had begged and pleaded with to sign onto HD-DVD but probably secretly hates many of the movie studios for fobbing off and making both Blu-ray and HD-DVD copies of their movies when Toshiba failed to nail the Blu-ray's coffin shut sufficiently.

Mainly because their initial offering of a standalone HD-DVD player at release was $700 and a very hard sell (regardless of the perfect backwards compatibility to regular DVD) due to an almost criminal lack of HD television products anywhere near the realm of affordable or useful given the selection of television programming being broadcast in high definition. Even now there is the Discovery Channel, HBO and what? Nobody wants MTV in high definition. Ever.

Then came along the Playstation 3 at an initial price of some $600 USD which was not only a video game console, it was ALSO a Blu-ray DVD player, so you got a video game system and $100 in your pocket for the price of the HD-DVD player is now. The PS3 is STILL one of the cheapest Blu-ray players out there because the blu-ray players are trying to keep a jump on technology by having all sorts of backwards compatibility with older formats, as well as sideways, forwards and vertical compatibility with the upcoming consumer level burnable Blu-ray DVDs. Can you imagine how many DivX movies you'll be able to put on one of those bad boys? Like SIXTY.

So in summary because it is dinner time and I want to eat. PS3 gets a gold star, for winning Sony the format war. Although I think it will still lose the format war in the end. There might be enough market share, if split well, for everyone to reach a level of financial success in their consoles. But I have severe doubts that there will ever be a Playstation 4.