The BD drive isn’t needed. There’s not enough interest in HD yet to warrant it – just look at the Wii, it doesn’t even support HD. The BD drive just drives up the price of the PS3 for no useful benefit.

I’ve heard these kind of arguments about Sony, BD, and the PS3 for a while now. If you read this space much, you’ll know that I have an HDTV myself and that I look forward to both buying and renting movies in HD to play on the PS3.

Am I in the minority?

Ponder with me, if you will, the idea that PS3 owners and Xbox 360 owners won’t be too different. They’ll both have the same kind of tech-savviness and they’ll both buy into HDTV in the same way. I don’t think the idea is too far-fetched. As a matter of fact, I think that because of the price and the BD drive, PS3 owners will be more likely to own HDTV sets than Xbox 360 owners, but that’s not really germane to this article.

Anyway, I have a nice little statistic for you, courtesy of Microsoft senior program manager Kevin Collins. According to Video Business Online: “He said that 30% of people who want to purchase games already have high-def displays, and 64% of Xbox 360 users already own high-def displays.”

I guess I’m not in the minority after all.

Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on unveiled