While it seems everyone is going blu there days and jumping off the HD-DVD bandwagon. With major studios professing their faithfulness to the Blu-Ray format, it appears retailers are getting a bit nervous as well. For those of you who own a HD-DVD player or add-on unit for your Xbox 360, check out this bargain!  Amazon.com is begining to sell of many of their HD-DVD titles at 50% off.

Come one come all…. It’s a steal on a great selection of High Definition media!

Sony Executives have been preaching the virtues of Blu-Ray now for years, while the response by consumers has been less enthusiastic.  From developers complaining of slow load times to consumers complaining about the additional cost to delaying the release of the Playstation 3 (PS3), Blu-Ray has been the butt of many jokes and the cause for lots of hate across the Internet.  The question that many have posed is simply, “Does the PS3 really need Blu-Ray?”

The argument could go on and on whether we need Blu-Ray the key is to make us want Blu-Ray.  In the true fashion of Apple Inc who creates the desire for a new iPod every time they come out with a new model even though the one you probably already have works just fine.  Sony needs to do is simply create the desire for Blu-Ray.  Here are two things I think Sony could do to create a desire for Blu-Ray in their gaming console. 

First is get first party game developers to really produce games that have lots of content.  Games that have an insane amount of maps for multiplayer and huge single player campaign that could rival the game play in Oblivion or Grand Theft Auto: San Andres.  Now some of you might remember Insomniac Games saying that they needed more then nine gigabytes for Resistance Fall of Man.  But I do not think using uncompressed audio and video counts.  If you had a game similar to Gears of War that the single player campaign took forty to sixty hours to complete, and there were forty to fifty multiplayer maps.  Graphics, audio, and map content that you could really show off the ability of the Blu-Ray disk to hold just a crazy amount of content.  Then when the XBox 360 comes out with Gears of War 2 and the single player campaign is an eight hour experience you can point to this game and show why Blu-Ray was needed for true Next Generation gaming.  By the way this would also help with the pricing issue also if you can say that users of the PS3 pay $59.99 for a game that lasts forty or fifty hours while other console owners pay $59.99 for games that last eight or nine….Hmmmm you do the math and figure out what is a better deal.

Second, with the renewed interest in retro gaming developers could release collector editions of their new games.  For example, say a certain developer who is releasing a little game called Devil May Cry 4 for the Playstation 3 and now the XBox 360.  If they were to offer a collectors edition of the game for the PS3 that contained not just Devil May Cry 4, but also all the previous versions too!  Now when cross platform games are released all of a sudden the PS3 version stands out from the rest as coming on one disk.  Just today Midway announced the collector’s edition of the up and coming StrangeHold for the PS3 will also contain the movie as well as the game.  This is the kind of thing that Sony really needs to encourage, to show why they needed to include a Blu-Ray drive with the PS3.

Of course anyone who has a high definition television and a Blu-Ray player be it a PS3 or otherwise also knows why we need and desire Blu-Ray, it is as simple as this.