http://www.kotaku.com/gaming/umd/umds-flying-off-the-shelves-in-japan-no-really-198641.php
Finally someone realized that the only thing wrong with the UMDs are the price!
Yeah, how the hell can you sell an inferior product to a DVD for the same price? You can’t.
Well, the supposed draw was in the convenience of portability. Then I guess it became apparent that there are countless devices in the portable media player sphere that don’t rely on proprietary media or optical discs. Why pay $25 for a movie on a little disc when you can rip the DVD – with special features – onto the hard drive of a mobile device that’s smaller and perhaps cheaper than the PSP? Now you have the DVD and a copy of the movie for the road.
Well, glad the studios are finally realizing it. I’m just hoping that there is still enough profit for them to start releasing movies at this price point, rather then what I’m guessing is them just selling their existing stock at extremely discountd prices to try and recoup some losses.
Still, I don’t have a PSP, do it doesn’t totally affect me, but eh, still good to know they may still be around if I ever get a PSP.
I always thought the smart move would be to sell a DVD/UMD bundle for like $5-$10 more than a DVD by itself. That way, you wouldn’t feel like you were buying the same movie twice.
You sir are a marketing genius.
Only problem would be fussy retailers that say they don’t want to double their shelf space for Sony DVD titles. Then again, maybe in that scenario you wouldn’t sell the UMD separate at all…
It’s even simpler than that, really. You can buy a portable DVD player that will play regular DVDs for around $100 these days. Without some additional incentive, that makes the portability of the UMD pretty much superfluous. Personally, I like Steve’s idea. I’d pay a little extra for a special bundle that contains both a DVD and a UMD. Honestly, I’d be more likely to do that than buy the UMD seperately, even if the price were the same.
Yeah, you wouldn’t have UMD release at all. I can’t imagine that many people only wanting a movie in UMD format only; they probably own the DVD too.
Effectively giving away the UMD version would also mean that fewer people would look to ripping their movies to memory stick because they wouldn’t be saying, “I need to buy it twice? That blows.”
Eh. I’d be more interested in a $10 or less UMD then a UMD/DVD combo pack. I’ve already stopped buying DVDs in anticipation of HD discs.
On a similar topic… is there any easy/reliable software for ripping dvds to a psp playable format yet? Any time I’ve tried there’s been a million unreliable steps and I always end up with a videofile that either doesn’t work, or doesn’t have sound, or has sound sync problems.
I’ve had very good luck with the DVD Decrypter->PSP Video 9 route. It’s worked 99.999% of the time.
Can anything save UMDs? I mean, regular old DVDs are selling in the $10 range, so the appeal of a $8 UMD movie is even less. I wonder if they could make money if they were $4 or $5.
I heard someone suggest on the 1UP podcast that they just move to selling games on 1GB memory sticks - they’d be a lot faster and you could just ditch UMDs completely. Can’t see how a change like that would hurt the PSP, given that the DS is kicking its’ butt. And if they move to memory sticks for games then they could come out with the PSP2 in a year or so and ditch the UMD drive alltogether.
I think a digital distribution would kick ass for the PSP. I just don’t see Sony being able to pull it off. It would be a piracy nightmare on that system.
Perhaps piracy is what is killing UMDs now?
Saying that, even as a joke, made me throw up a little bit in my mouth.