Thus the idea that BRD was included in PS3 just to promote the format can't be proven by any argument (and shouldn't be stated as fact). It's only personal opinion. If there were no other reasons for an HD drive, I could agree that it's only there for BluRay promotion. As it is, furthering BluRay movies is one benefit of several that contribute to the full feature-set of the PlayStation 3.
Well that's my point really. Sony are bringing a high-tech game playing device to the market which is expected to be on the market for a long period of time (based on the previous Playstation devices, we are think about 5-10 years). Now you start thinking about what features you are going to support over what period of time, and make an estimation of what kinds of costs you are going to incur over that period of time, how they are going to scale over that period of time, and whether they add enough value to your system.
Now, the thing with games is that they drive technology. To expand the possibility of what games can bring to a consumer, the games manufacturor adds hardware. In the case of Nintendo, this may have been a touch screen and a wii-mote more than anything else this time, but it is still the key factor that drives progress in this area and has been for a long time. At some point, however, these 'game devices' reach a certain point where, for little extra effort, they can do more than just play games. Often the limit is just software - there is nothing in the hardware specifications of the Xbox 360 Premium that bars it from running Windows XP or Linux, for instance, but its manufacturor has chosen to market it solely as a games console.
Enter the Playstation 3. Nearly every part of its hardware design is a logical step upwards from the Playstation 2 specifications, including the BluRay drive with its 50GB capacity versus the 9GB that was available on the PS2's DVD drive. Already on the original Playstation, where the CD-drive was chosen, there was overlap between the CD-ROM disc for holding the game data, and the CD discs that were and are still used for Audio CDs. In the Japanese version, support for Video CD was also included, although this didn't happen in other regions as Video CD never really broke through all that well outside of Japan. For the PS2, the next logical step was DVD, but this time the DVD functionality overlapped more clearly with video standards that used the same disc format. In some regions such as the U.S., DVD had already broken through as the most important new video format when the PS2 came to market, and so Sony decided to offer support for DVD Video playback on day one.
All this time, however, it is important to remember that both the CD and DVD formats were primarily digital formats that allowed permanent storage of digital information, whether this was music, data, video or otherwise. The DVD name, 'Digital Versatile Disc', says it all, really.
BluRay is no different in both regards. First of all, it is a versatile disc format that can be used to store music, data, video (it's all data anyway), and its increase in capacity suits the natural progression of hardware capacity from the Playstation 2 to the Playstation 3. If you were to design your next gameconsole on autopilot, BluRay would make perfect sense and there are barely any alternatives on the market that have the right combination of capacity and hardware production scaling forecasts - i.e., since the BluRay format is likely to be used for video and data besides the targetted game distribution, the cost of BluRay player parts is likely to drop to very attractive prices soon enough, just as they did for CD and DVD player parts.
Considering that the additional cost of BluRay over a DVD drive really only seems to be $100 at this point in time (i.e. Sony can at least for now afford to bring out a 20GB PS3 for $100 more than the 20GB 360, and it doesn't look too likely that they will let the gap will increase), and prospects for the future look good (i.e. the cost of the BluRay player will come down faster than the costs of the DVD player).
This then is the starting point of the discussion of whether or not BluRay brings something to the table for Sony. Since Sony is also a platform holder for Bluray as video distribution medium, and they can easily make the PS3 a viable BluRay player as well as a gamesconsole, the decision to go for BluRay becomes an absolute no-brainer for them. But it will be interesting to see whether the latest console generation will be the first generation in which game-sizes stabilise. Microsoft has gambled it won't, and that, in my view, is much more controversial and revolutionary a concept than including BluRay in the PS3 before the medium has established itself as the leading
video distribution format.
And thus we have the crux of why I disagree so strongly with scooby. This post doesn't agree with anything you say either; I just felt the need to flesh out my opinion here.
Of course, scooby may still end up being right. If a large enough percentage of games suffices with DVD and the advantage of having some games that support BluRay fully and make a better game for it doesn't outweigh the price difference, then - expressly disregarding the benefits for Sony of pushing the BluRay as video distribution format as well as any benefits for the consumer in this regard - the choice for DVD from the perspective of a games platform could have been the right one. Personally, though, I'm kind of hoping it won't be, and actually will partly blame Microsoft if it will. The reason that few games make good use of the extra capacity of BluRay may, after all, in the end be partly because multiplatform games become "360-limited" in that respect.
