So with news that Japan is shelving the HD-DVD format from stores entirely, an interesting bit of news in the post portem of the high def wars, around the question — did Sony pay off Toshiba to end the war?  Well, CmdrTaco is posing that question over at Slashdot, anyway, thanks to a small piece of business information that likely slid under the radar of most interested parties about 3 days ago, courtesy of Reuters.

That news was that Sony was selling off some of its microchip production plants, which produce technology and chips critical for the Cell processor and RSX chips, both of which are part of the PS3. It is in the process of selling these plants to Toshiba for around $900 million dollars.

Now, a caveat.

As with most things on this blog, I am supremely unqualified to make any further judgements and opinions on this particular matter.

But now that its out of the way, I think there are some interesting questions that fall out of this otherwise irrelevant bit of information (because at the end of the day, the high definition wars are over).

Namely, that it would only be a pay off if the $900M price tag is hugely discounted AND/OR the technology therein is so valuable that the cost to create such technology for what Toshiba intends to do with it, is far in excess of it

Or … that by selling off this portion of this business to Toshiba, its, in effect, allowing Toshiba to profit from the increased sales of the PS3 product, thereby acting as a hedge against the losses of the HD-DVD format. This is somewhat legitimate given that the PS3 is projected to have huge sales / potentially rule the roost over the next decade or so, only strengthened by the fact that — from some people’s perspective — for the price you pay, its either a blu-ray player where you get an awesome console system attached, or, an awesome console system with a free blu-ray player attached.

Irrespective of whether Sony or did not hasten HD-DVD’s demise (and it seems like there were a whole lot of things that did), at the end of the day, is kind of irrelevant. Many stakeholders were waiting for someone to emerge a winner, and for most lay-folk, I don’t think it really mattered which — only that this format war finish as quickly (or as slowly) as it finally did.

It announces that its going to start spying on you.

In a round-about way, of course. There’s a great piece over at the Boston.com where Sony is going into a partnership with Nielson so that usage data by gamers on the Sony network can be analyzed by them. This is good news for Sony because in selling that data, they’ll be able to defray the costs of their wickedly expensive console. Now, while I am *sure* that no *personal* data will be analyzed, and that gamer behaviour will only be able to be measured in aggregate, this announcement only seems to make sense from a corporate point of view.

Sony — the company — will be able to defray costs of making their luridly expensive console by selling user gaming habits.

Sure, there are valid reasons to do this and the article brings them up. The gaming market is worth billions but is undercapitalized because advertisers don’t know anything about gamers.

Fine.

But the gamer in *me* says something else. Something like … you know what?

Rather than trying to offset the cost of your gargantuan strategic mistake of making such an expensive machine on the backend by leading to some misunderstandings and possibly creating a(nother) public relations nightmare — why not do the simple thing that will make both gamers AND stockholders happy?

Why don’t you just make better games? Exclusive games? Games that give people a reason to buy a console that for some, is the equivalent of a mortgage payment?

I recognize that it might not be easy, but for land’s sake gentlemen — on a background of failing sales and a summer where reading is otherwise light, this is a public relations firestorm that is just waiting to be lit.