UMD-DVD Bundles Finally Announced.

[Yoshi]

ok, Jeremy. I'm going to try to draw a parallel here that takes the emotion out of the discussion.

Let's say you own a car that requires unleaded gasoline and a pickup truck that requires diesel fuel. Both types of fuel power vehicles, so some people might see them as a direct competitor. However, an oil company may have a harder time recouping their cost if they make diesel fuel, because there are less vehicles that use it. Thus, diesel might be $3 a gallon, while unleaded is $2.50. If you are buying diesel for your truck, which requires it, you aren't being scammed. You are paying a fair, albeit higher, market price for a product. Your truck in this example cannot run on diesel, just like a PSP cannot play DVDs, so a direct comparison isn't valid, even though it seems obvious to try.

[Jeremy]

That works pretty well, thanks.

[Glitch]

You kids...

[mollipen]

DVDs are cheaper to produce and recoup their R&D more quickly than UMDs, since there are 10,000x more players out there. I don't see the scam. I don't buy UMD movies, but I understand economics and, thus, why they are priced the way they are.

First, there's no R&D costs. What R&D? Sony made the things anyhow for the PSP's games, and with wanting to get companies to release movies for the PSP, even if Sony does build in "R&D" costs, they can't be that much.

There's next to no development costs for the UMD movie wise, because almost all of that work was already done for the DVD version.

The fact that the DVD market is far, far larger is spot on, and I certainly agree that the cost of releasing these things is made back far sooner via DVD. That still doesn't excuse the fact that a two-disc special edition DVD costs less than the barebones UMD version, which itself is a lower resolution encoding of the movie.

[TobalRox]

And thanks to Yoshi, Sony wins again...

[Yoshi]

That still doesn't excuse the fact that a two-disc special edition DVD costs less than the barebones UMD version, which itself is a lower resolution encoding of the movie.

The encoding has no effect on manufacturing though. UMDs have to cost more to print than CDs. I'm not saying that UMD movies are a great deal. The only one I own is the Spider-Man 2 that came with my PSP, but they are also not the gigantic scam that you guys make them out to be.