Upcoming games that makes me glad I'm a species born with opposabl

[Lissa]

I don't think it matters. Either technology is sufficient to get the job done. Drives for computers will be a small fraction of the standalone mass-market, and won't have much influence. The determinant of a winner, if any, is the format that has the movies people want to see (and own). Right now, that's a split decision, with disc sales tipping in Blu-Ray's favor.

What's really interesting is the ~$150 million Microsoft paid Paramount and Dreamworks to keep HD-DVD on life support. It looks like they don't want a winner in this war. They'd rather they both fail and provide direct downloads as the only viable alternative.

There's another aspect though to providing larger discs, crisper pictures, more additional features, the possibility of putting entire series onto a single disc, and this is just from the movie perspective.

Also, MS paid the money for HD not for direct download, but to try and bury Sony as a console maker. MS has produced an add on HD drive for the XBox for around $100. If they can get enough of the XBox crowd to use the HD drives to play movies, this could tip things their way as well since XBox is around 10 Million people and PS3 is still trying to scrape up 2 Million people. If MS can get the XBoxers to spend $100 on HD drives so they can watch HD movies, that's more money in MS' pocket.