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Sony And The No-Confidence Vote
Sony continues to spend the goodwill it has achieved over the last generation of consoles. As widely reported over the weekend, last Friday CEO for SCE Europe David Reeves spoke to the press. "We have built up a certain brand equity over time since the launch of PlayStation in 1995 and PS2 in 2000 that the first five million are going to buy it, whatever it is, even it didn't have games." This 'you'll buy it anyway' attitude has further annoyed gamers already rankling from the announced pricetag. Next Gen and IGN talk about the two sides of the coin, with IGN laying into the company for the lack of HDMI output in the cheaper model, and Next Generation saying that Sony is far from defeated.
But in 2000, most people had not seen DVD in action, players were ridiculously expensive, and more importantly, so were DVD movies. It had barely entered into the equation in PCs.
Not true. I built a computer with a DVD drive and MPEG decoder card in 1998, and quite affordably. By 2000, consumer DVD players were in the sub-$200 range and DVDs were already taking significant amounts of shelf space away from VHS in retail stores and video rental outlets. And at no time did the typical DVD movie EVER sell for about $30 or so.
By 2000, Circuit City's DIVX experiment had already failed.