Those critical of the PlayStation 3"s price often point to the Blu-ray Drive components: not only has the inclusion driven up the bill of materials cost, it"s also much to blame for the initial shortage of consoles at launch and the delayed release into Europe and Australia. "The blue laser diode, as you well know, had a blip short-term ramp up issue, which is now past; that"s now behind us. That did cause us some challenges in being able to supply the launch worldwide, but that"s all resolved," said Phil Harrison, SCE Worldwide Studios, in a GameDaily interview.
Some consumers clamor on Internet forums that the Blu-ray Drive"s added cost is nothing but another effort for Sony to sneak its HD format into the homes of consumers. It cannot be removed and offered as an add-on of course, as PS3 games also run off of blue laser media. "We needed to have Blu-ray disc from a game design point of view. The chipsets in PS3 chew through data at such a rate that in order to build variety and detail and quality into the games, we need more than nine gigabytes. Now, the fact that we could also adopt the preeminent next generation movie format into PS3 was an added bonus, not an added cost," Harrison added.
Sony remains confident in the decision: "No regrets whatsoever, and it"s those kinds of decisions, painful though they were to live through in the last quarter of 2006, those are the decisions that are going to propel PlayStation 3 to be a platform that lasts for ten years, like we"ve seen with PS1 and PS2. And it will be, I believe, reflected on as the smartest decision we ever made," Harrison said.