Toshiba may have waved the white flag last week when they announced they were conceding the high definition format war to rival Sony, but that hasn’t stopped high definition consumers from giving HD-DVD the top spot on the weekly HD sales charts.
In a bizarre twist American Gangster, starring Denzel Washington and Russel Crowe, on HD-DVD came in at the top spot. It was predicted that from here on out HD-DVD would slowly slide off the charts altogether, but it seems the format was intent on making one last splash.
There’s an immediate temptation to hold out hope for HD-DVD to make the greatest comeback since the Dreamcast came back to squash the PS2. However, it is more than a little bit likely that this small victory is due to the fact that retailers everywhere are still being forced to try and sell merchandise for a dead format. You don’t have to look a lot further than the recent massive price drop of the Xbox 360 HD-DVD player to see the reason this is happening. There are still a lot of people out there with HD-DVD players, and while Toshiba may be abandoning the format, these people are still stuck with these devices that will effectively become paperweights in a few months.
You can expect to see lots of people trying to get as much use out of their machines as possible while they still can. Especially while the merch is dirt-cheap.
[via Next-Gen]
