We all know that Sony is a huge multifaceted company with products in the TV, Desktop/Laptop, Cell Phone (Sony Ericsson) Video game and Movie fields which means they had a lot to gain from owning a current standard format. With the format under there control they can, in theory, get priority with manufacturing their own movies and make money off studios who choose to use the format. Remember how pornography ended up on the VHS before the end of the format war, questionably assisting its victory. DVD also adopted it to much acclaim, but what about Bluray? Sony initially said that pornography had no place on Bluray and refused to help manufacture them, shortly after the adult industry found places that would manufacture it's films. Both produced perfect HD movies and I bet you can tell by the tone of this so far I was more of a fan of HD-DVD. The features of the HD-DVD side were great: PiP Commentary, Menu Bar accessible without movie interruption, Internet connectivity and double sided disc including DVD compatible side. Most of these features were adopted by Sony after Toshiba bowed out. The only real difference was Format Size and Cost, Bluray coming in at 50GB max and HD-DVD 30GB with Bluray being the most expensive.

You may wonder how this relates to video games, well unfortunately not kindly. Microsoft decided to continue its use of DVD in the Xbox 360 which so far has been a win/loss scenario with some recent games requiring multiple discs while disc run fast and are inexpensive. Sony did use Bluray and while including a player for a fraction of the cost of standalone's the games suffer slower runtime (meaning longer load times in some cases) at the cost of huge storage eliminating multiple discs, for now. Some PlayStation 3 games also require mandatory partial installs to assist in runtime but still as of yet have not allowed the installation of an entire disc like the Xbox 360.

Now we look to the future of video games and wonder what Microsoft will do to replace the aging DVD while Sony fines a way to tame the mighty Bluray. Some now speculate Microsoft adopting the Bluray but the complications may cause them to look elsewhere, hopefully HD-DVD. No mater what happens its Sony that wins, making money hand over fist on a format that some can't live without...

What do you think?