Owners of the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on shouldn't go trading them in for $50 just yet. According to Microsoft Game Studios Corporate Vice President "there is still enjoyment to be had" from that defunct piece of entertainment technology.

As part of a Q&A with GameDaily, Kim talked up the features of the outdated add-on, including a library of over 500 HD DVD movies (and growing not growing) available at clearance prices (because they're being cleared out). The drive also lets you have a movie and a game disc in the system at the same time, meaning you can switch from Halo 3 directly to watching August Rush without having to get up! Finally, the HD DVD drive adds two extra USB ports to your 360, meaning you can charge your DualShock 3s that much more easily! Yes, the HD DVD drive is truly a bargain, even without new content. Get yours today!

Mega-chain Best Buy is sending $50 gift cards to customers who bought HD DVD players or attachments from its US stores prior to Feb. 23 (coincidentally, for our readership, the date Microsoft declared the format dead to the company). CNN reports most customers won't have to do a thing to receive the card as they'll be identified through the Reward Zone program, service plans or online purchases. If you're a customer who won't be identified in this manner, just grab a receipt (you do keep those, right?) or provide your credit card info to the company for proof of purchase. Gift cards will be sent out by May 1.

Circuit City provided a similar deal earlier this month to recent HD DVD adopters by allowing them to return the product if it had been purchased within 90 days. Both Best Buy and Circuit City's online trade-in programs (run by the same company) will allow you to unload your player beginning March 21. Before anyone thinks they're being witty, only HD DVD players can be returned for store credit, you're not getting $50 per movie disc purchased. Although this format war was in no way these retailer's fault, it's very nice to see them taking care of customers left out in the cold.

Attention, people who collect obsolete technology -- here's the perfect chance to, um, add some obsolete technology to your collection! While Microsoft recently announced they're no longer producing HD DVD add-on drives for the Xbox 360, they are unloading their remaining supply at a bargain-basement price of $50, as a Microsoft spokesperson told Bloomberg.

Sure enough, online retailers from Circuit City to Best Buy to Buy.com are listing the defunct accessory for 25 percent of it's original price. At that price, the remaining stock could go fast. Then again, with the prospect of more HD-DVD discs looking less than good, maybe $50 is still too expensive to unload.

We were pretty certain when we first heard the rumors, and we were even more certain when other sources said an official announcement was coming. Now that the official announcement from Toshiba has officially happened, we're officially 100% sure that HD DVD is officially dead. Official!

Well, maybe we should scale that back a little. Although lead company Toshiba has said they'll no longer make HD DVD players, they are reportedly stocking up on recordable HD DVD media for those who want to make their own discs (remember: BetaMax lasted for years as a professional recording format for broadcast outlets). And there's nothing preventing entertainment companies from continuing to put out HD DVDs if they want to. We don't know why they'd want to but hey. if people are still making Sega Genesis games, anything is possible.

In the wake of the recent announcement of Warner Bros' new allegiance to the Blu-ray format (and, as result, sister company New Line Cinema's similarly adopted format loyalty), the HD DVD group has canceled their pre-Consumer Electronics Show press conference. We're not sure if the announcement will impact the HD DVD Promotion Group's booth at the show, though we imagine it will create an atmosphere for their visitors with a level of awkwardness similar to that of a nursing home.

In a mass email to CES attendees, a representative for the group said they are "currently discussing the potential impact of this announcement with the other HD DVD partner companies and evaluating next steps." If these "next steps" don't include lining the pockets of every remaining film publisher on the market to convince them your format's still viable, HD DVD could go the way of the Betamax with a quickness.

(Via PS3F)

It seems Sony and Microsoft no longer have their hearts fully in the battle over high-definition movie disc formats -- if they ever had them there in the first place, that is. In an interview with Home Media Magazine, Microsoft Consumer Media Group Director Kevin Collins seemed uninterested in making the format a cornerstone of the Xbox 360 package. "Microsoft knew if we put in an HD DVD drive that we would have to raise costs and disenfranchise our customers (that are primarily gamers) as the unit would become too expensive," he said.

While Collins said he was proud of HD DVD's strong performance against Blu-Ray, his desire for a fight to the death between the formats left something to be desired. "The [Blu-ray] camp's claims about Microsoft's desire to have a format war are baseless," Collins said.

Sony CEO Howard Stringer, for his part, told the AP said he thought the high-def disc battle had reached a stalemate, mainly due to the lower costs of HD DVD players and the defection of Paramount to the HD DVD camp. That's OK though ... apparently the winner of the movie war doesn't matter all that much after all. "It doesn't mean as much as all that," Sony CEO Howard Stringer told the AP. Yeah ... and those grapes are probably sour, anyway.

Read - Microsoft / Home Media Magazine (via High-Def Digest)
Read - Sony / AP

If you're like us, there was one primary factor in your choice of high-definition disc formats: the availability of Dragon's Lair. By that logic, we were siding with Blu-ray for awhile, but now we're just ambivalent.

An HD-DVD version of Dragon's Lair is coming August 15 for $29.99, the same price as the Blu-ray incarnation. O, what are we to do? We can't decide, so we'll just stick to our DS version, thank you very much.

There are more game systems that can play high-definition movies than standalone players that can do the same, according to sales numbers culled from recent media reports.

In the HD DVD realm, a Microsoft representative told CNet UK that the company had sold 155,000 units of the Xbox 360's HD DVD player in the States, making it the best-selling add-on in the system's short history. Compare that to the 100,000 standalone players that the HD DVD Promotional Group said had sold through April and you can see that it's primarily gamers driving adoption of the format.

The results are similar in the Blu-Ray realm, where the million-plus PS3s sold in North America dwarfs the "less than 100,000" standalone players sold according to a Business Week article. It's unclear exactly how many PS3 owners are actually using their systems to play the high-def movie format, but strong Blu-ray disc sales would seem to indicate that at least some of them are taking advantage of the feature.

What's more, the sales of high-def discs seem to finally be making a dent in the traditional DVD market. Sales of standard-definition DVDs were down eight percent in the first quarter of this year and analysts predict they'll begin to level off as more high-def game systems are sold.

Read - HD DVD Posse: "There's Room for Both Formats" (CNet UK) [Via Xbox360Fanboy]
Read - In DVD war, body blows for Toshiba (BusinessWeek)

The Sony BDP-S300 Blu-ray player has been dropped $100 in price to $499, putting it below the price of the PlayStation 3.

Sony, who once touted the PS3 as the cheapest Blu-ray player on the market, has appeared to have crossed off its own talking point. But if priced the same, the BDP-S300 would be a tough sale against the game console, whose only apparent benefit is quieter hardware.

We don't want to suggest the PS3, now with only one model in North America, may drop below the $600 threshold, but the Blu-ray player's reduced price may indicate that the manufacturing costs for Blu-ray components have lowered, making the console less of a loss leader for Sony.

The High Definition disc format is still competing against the Toshiba-backed HD-DVD for market share. The cheapest standalone HD-DVD player still costs $100 ($200 this Father's Day) less than the BDP-S300.

[Via Engadget; thanks, Jonah]

Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter has drawn a parallel between the success of a high-definition format and its related game console, believing that Sony will gain an "insurmountable advantage" over Microsoft if movie studios embrace Blu-ray, and vice-versa for Microsoft to "maintain its first mover advantage."

"Notwithstanding the efforts of the three console manufacturers to deliver compelling exclusive content, we expect the ultimate outcome of the console wars to be decided by the motion picture studios," he said.

Pachter ultimately predicts a close, three-way tie in the market share for this generation of consoles: Sony at 36%, Nintendo at 34% and Microsoft at 30%. In Japan, he said, Ninendo will have a 51% share through 2011 (is Pachter also a time traveler?), Sony with 44% and Microsoft presumably with the remaining 5%.

Remember, for every conclusion you may draw from Pachter's report, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other analysts with contradictory conclusions. Should either high-definition format come out on top, it still has to contend with its big brother, DVD, for some time now, and therefore its impact on the console wars is minimal at best compared to the system's relative price and software.

[Via PS3 Fanboy]

In a short but sweet news post, Xbox Zone revealed new details on the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive it discovered from Xbox Australia. The most pertinent news is that Oz will get its chance to pick up the add-on peripheral on March 29 for $249 AUD, which translates to approximately the $200 price tag for the US edition.

The initial shipments of the drive will come with a Universal Remote Control (we presume he means the official Microsoft one) and a copy of King Kong on HD DVD. We're not going to pretend we can gauge the next-gen format market in Australia right now, so anyone hailing from the Land Down Under is more than welcome to contribute observations.

Warner Bros has announced it will unveil a videodisc next week, dubbed Total HD, that plays in both HD DVD and Blu-ray drives. We've known about this decision since September, when the studio filed a patent for such a disc. (Though the patent mentions embedded DVD, this news report doesn't.)

The ramifications of such a disc, if it's priced to compete, would render the format wars obsolete. If you're planning on buying a new-gen game console based on the HD disc it can play (and the PlayStation 3 is a bargain for a Blu-ray player), the adoption of Total HD discs would make the decision a tad easier (and more game-specific).

Will the disc have the goods? We'll find out the full details next week at the Consumer Electronics Show.

"But that plays on Blu-ray, you can't stick it in there."

"Watch me!"

"Oh ... Oh, my."

[Via Firing Squad]

The fate of the Blu-ray will not have a big impact by the inclusion of a Blu-ray player in the PlayStation 3, according to Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons. Speaking to an investor conference in New York, Parson called the next-gen DVD format war "unfortunate," remarking that the competing formats -- Blu-ray and HD DVD -- drive costs down and confuse consumers.

We don't mind a competition-spurred price reduction in our movies, but we're also hesitant to purchase a next-gen DVD in the event we pick the losing format. Parsons notes that people were more likely to use the PS3 for games -- but if we want to watch high-definition films, at least we know there's a Blu-ray player already in our entertainment center. If the PlayStation 3 becomes a success in hardware sales, might Parsons be underestimating its impact?

Time Warner is a media conglomerate that owns Warner Bros., Turner, NewLine, HBO and AOL, our parent company. Warner Bros. currently releases films in both HD DVD and Blu-ray. Sony's decision to put a Blu-ray player in the PS3 has been frequently called a "trojan horse" move to drive sales of Blu-ray discs.

[Via Game|Life]

Experimentalists at UNEASYsilence have outlined how you can turn the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive into a Windows-compatible HD DVD drive -- all you need are the proper drivers. If that wasn't enough, they disassembled the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive to find the exact model (Toshiba HD-DVD OEM drive) and to see if there might be some way to connect the drive directly to a computer, as opposed to using the USB connection (there's not, due to the "strangest plug ... we have ever seen" on the back of the Toshiba drive).

Mac users may be delighted to know that Apple computers instantly recognize the HD DVD drive when plugged in, but unfortunately no player exists that can play HD DVD in MacOS exists yet; however, DVD works fine and it's only a matter of time before someone writes the proper software. UNEASYsilence also has a plethora of pictures from when they tore apart the drive, if you're curious as to the inner workings of the latest Xbox 360 toy.

Nintendo Canada's Marketing Director, Pierre-Paul Trépanier, doesn't appear to like HD-DVD or Blu-ray all too much. The sentiment doesn't shock us, especially given Nintendo's history of format choice. If anything, we can set our watch by such statements.

Trépanier told GamesIndustry.biz, "I think forcing a decision on consumers would certainly not be part of Nintendo's strategy." You mean like forcing us to upgrade to a DVD-enhanced Wii if we decide we want to play DVDs? He goes on to say that gaming consoles should focus on playing games -- which hardly explains the Wii's blackboard capabilities, among other nifty non-gaming options. The ire toward HD-DVD is confusing considering the drive is an optional add-on to the Xbox 360 and won't play any games.

Trépanier's opinions are all well and good, but we're getting irritated by the word "forcing" being tossed around like an old football. There are no documented cases of Sony busting into someones home, kicking them in soft places, taking $600 out of their wallet and leaving a shiny PS3 as they climb into their black helicopters. Sony isn't forcing Blu-ray onto anyone; they're putting it into their home console. It's up to the consumer to decide if the price premium the PS3's Blu-ray inclusion entailed is worth it to them. Whether or not Blu-ray is regarded as a great addition to gaming or a lame Trojan Horse has yet to be seen.