Within 7 days you will be able to pick up a brand new Xbox 360 HD-DVD for the rock bottom price of $49.99 US.

It seems in a last ditch effort to unload its remaining stock of HD-DVD addon player, MS has asked retailers to lower the price to a rock bottom $49.99. A move that will also be sure to tick off SONY a bit and will also be a bit of a drag to those uninformed buyers that have no Idea what kind of trouble the format is in at this time. But heck maybe it will be worth something in the future as a collectors item.

There are other effects to consider that can result from this move from MS, Intended or not.

First, it was stated...People buy the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on and realize that the up-scaling of regular DVDs adds new life. Then the next-gen format war turns into old verse new instead of new versus new. ( what ever that means )

Second, The players will fly off store shelves by both the uninformed and the informed that want it anyway or cant resist a good deal, This will add to the delay of Blu-ray taking a compleat hold over the marked, If the delay is too long, then Sony has a problem that most hadn’t even considered. Going head to head with digital downloads. And that was Microsoft’s goal wasn’t it?

But the odds are that MS will eventualy give up the feud and adapt and survive.

And here is great bit of irony, MS is already threatening to SUE SONY if they dont help MS with Blu-ray, No Joke!
MS needs SONY's help to make Blu-ray compatable. Sony knows that they cannot justify charging MS a fee that is larger than any other customer. Sony wants to make Blu-Ray ubiquitous so they have shaved down fees as much as possible. So MS must get the same deal as everyone else.

"But Sony wants to control this technology in the gaming space, and prevent success by a competitor in the expansive entertainment markets of this space. Where much of the cash flow for these kinds of products will lie in the coming years from also using gaming consoles as home entertainment media extenders, central to the digital entertainment lifestyle."

"What would you do now if you were Sony? The same thing MS has done over the years. Make the technology intentionally incompatible, withhold information, withhold support for design input to make it compatible, etc."

"We'll see over the next few months. Either MS will come out with a Blu-Ray player, or they will file suit to force Sony to share, in much the same way many others sue MS for the same reasons on Windows compatibility. It will be interesting to watch this unfold."

This war is not over, Its just moving from a boxing match to a chess match.


News-Source 1: XboxFamily
News-Source 2: Satallite guys
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