great sell a game console as just a BR player, now thats getting desperate..... i bet all the standalone player companies are very happy with sony doing this to them...

Well the big selling point of the PS2 in Japan was that it was a very affordable DVD player at the time and that factor alone helped move alot of units. Doing that made developers focus more on the PS2 and make more games for the PS2. Sony was hoping for a similar situation with the PS3, but it was released at too high a price and it competes with HD-DVD. Had Sony gotten together with Toshiba to collaborate on a unified format that was more cost effective, by possibly using red lasers instead of blue for example, then not only could they have lowered the initial price of the PS3 they would also not have to compete with another high definition format. In that scenario I probably would have gotten a PS3 by now simply as a cheap high definition player that I could play games on. Of course that didn't happen, the PS3 released at too high a price partly due to licensing, even though ironically they are on the board whom they pay licensing too, and the competition from the HD-DVD format was enough to make alot of people think that they should just wait out this format war until one format or the other came down to an affordable price.

I know alot of people say the PS3 should have had better games at launch, but really the PS2 had crappy games at launch and only got better games whey they had a big enough audience for developers to care about. You can't tell me with a strait face that the PS3 had better launch titles than the Sega Dream Cast, I mean c'mon FANTAVISION??????!!!!!! No the problem is the PS3 base hasn't become big enough for alot of developers to devote their time to it, but Nintendo's has and thus even EA is devoting resources to the Wii and cutting them from the PS3. The PS3 also doesn't have the ease of development and low development costs that helped the PSX take off.

So now yes all you have is a blu-ray player and I'm sure some manufacturers of stand alone blu-ray players aren't too happy. I suppose it's great if you want Spider Man 3 on blu-ray, but I'd rather take Transformers and an HD DVD player. Still Sony needs to offer this low end PS3 to push blu-ray and it would work if they didn't have to compete against HD DVD. Then again without this low cost player then blu ray would be in trouble during the holiday season since you can now get an HD DVD player for under $300