PS3 European launch helped sell over 180,000 Blu-ray movies

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So I guess I'm alone in being annoyed that Sony decided to sacrifice their place as #1 in the console wars just to try and enter the living room a bit more? Hooray, your niche format is slightly (in the whole home market) outselling the other niche format. That's totally worth alienating people with a higher cost, and in turn a lower fanbase, which isn't attracting any exclusive titles (in many cases, losing some). Yeah, that was totally worth selling 80k copies of Casino Royale in high def. Wheeeeee.

Blu-ray isn't just about HiDef movies, it's also trying to future proof their games by not being restricted to a 9Gb DVD.

5 years ago, 9Gb was a lot of data. In a couple of years from now? Maybe not so much.

I still don't like Blu-Ray. 50GB games will take forever to load

@ Andy If you owned a PS3 you would know Blue Lazer Diodes are far more consistant the HD-DVD Red Lazer diodes which read faster but are much more inconsistant, proving the Blu-Ray is a far more efficient reader. Also you would know PS3 games save lots of files on the HDD for immediate reading instead of having to search on the CD, making it even faster. So yea, your wrong...

The inclusion of Blu-Ray in the PS3 probably won't be fully appreciated for another year yet. Just around the time that half of Americans own HDTVs. I wasn't to thrilled about the price of the PS3 before I got one either, in fact I was pretty pissed that the thing had a Blu-Ray player at all, but now I couldn't be happier.

Blu-Ray movies on my Samsung LN-T4066f are incredible, FAR superior to DVD. I know that may not be a major selling point to a lot of gamers, but the core audience that Sony is trying to attract (24-35yo males) it's a big plus even if we know it or not.

The PS3 is more than a gaming console, it's a living room staple and it performs like a champ. My PS3 is on 13-18 hours a day either folding, streaming content from my PC to my living room, running games, or playing movies. Not to mention that the thing just looks/feels like it's worth 2 grand. I'm not a Sony fanboy, but they made one damn fine machine... now if it only had a better library of games.

@Ty: Lucky for you the library is increasing in depth and breadth every week. The Darkness and R6: Vegas just dropped and the AAA titles are coming next month. Also if you like baseball games, we have a few already.