Take a guess at who just whooped HD-DVD in sales? Home Media Research today announced that Blu-Ray had surpassed the 1 million sales mark, making it the first next-gen format to do so. The report released states that 70% of all movies sold in the first three months of the year were Blu-Ray — no doubt a straight a kick to HD-DVD’s nads.
These remarkable sales are attributed not so much to the PS3, but to having more movie studios behind the format. That’s not to say that the PS3 did it’s fair share of work, considering it’s the cheapest Blu-Ray player on the market still. But like all format wars, reports and numbers don’t mean anything until a few years have passed and the consumers have made up their minds.
Blu-Ray cracks million unit sales mark [Electronista]
Is that an all-time figure, or Year-To-Date? The article isn’t clear, but I’m kind of hoping it’s YTD, or this is really, really, sad.
Either way, it’s absolutely pathetic. The more popular HD optical format has taken this long to sell fewer copies of all titles combined than Casino Royale has sold on DVD, in just the UK. One disc in one country, versus an entire format world-wide, and Blu-Ray manages to lose horribly. And HD-DVD is even worse.
This isn’t a format war. It’s a format cripple fight.