Last I heard (obviously these figures change all the time) there were more Blu-Ray players about because of the PS3, but it meant that Blu-Ray had a lower movies per player ratio, simply because anybody who bought an HD-DVD player bought it for HD-DVD movies and would therefore have bought several, whereas a lot of people bought a PS3 for games and are happy to wait for this whole silly format war to die before committing to it for their movie collection.
Rather long sentence aside, I think that if anything the PS3 helped make the figures more misleading (with both sides being able to claim specific victories) rather than help declare a clear winner.
EDIT - Shortly after posting this I stumbled across a
Guardian article with some info that kind of matches what I was saying:
Quote:
It turns out that on the first day in the UK the plain [300] DVD sold 143,131 units (7% greater than forecast); the HD DVD version 1,875 units; the Blu-ray version, 4,689. The proportions are thus DVD 95.6%; HD DVD 1.2%; Blu-ray 3.1%. For the full first week the numbers were 438,000, 5,000 and 13,000 - giving ratios of 96%, 1.1% and 2.9%.
If you were going to pick a winner for the high-definition formats out of that bunch, you'd give the edge very slightly to Blu-ray - though remember that lots of those sales are to owners of Sony's PlayStation 3, whose price was cut last week. But while they might leap on a film that most closely resembles a game anyway .... they're less likely to stump up the cash for softer titles that don't involve gore and bluescreen animation.
The HD DVD group insists that what matters is the "standalone" player market, and that they have 70% of that. I'm unconvinced. The standalone player market is all the HD DVD group has. Sony is still pursuing its Trojan horse tactic with the PS3, aiming to get it into lots of homes. Whether that's actually succeeding is another matter: UK sales of the PS3 could best be described as slow, and there still aren't any compelling games for it (the principal reason for buying a games console, after all).
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