PS2 Class Action Lawsuit Against DVD Player 73
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simoniker
from the dewey-cheatem-and-howe dept.
from the dewey-cheatem-and-howe dept.
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing us to this class action lawsuit against Sony regarding the Playstation 2's DVD player. You can fill in a form on the page to be informed of 'material developments' and assist the case, which alleges that the PS2's "..DVD player component suffers from a number of defects that prevents it from playing a wide-variety of DVD movies." Unfortunately, it seems the lawyers forgot to change the page title, which still reads 'Palm M130 Class Action Home Page'. Uhm, whoops.
Re:Other suit (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem occured because Sony didn't put enough energy into developing it or testing it as a DVD Player. It's hard to justify putting that much energy into that aspect of the unit when the primary (and profitable) purpose is to play games. It was inevitable that it'd be half-assed at best.
It's an unwritten law: the more your game console does besides play games, the less successful it will be. The Phillips CD-I pops into mind. It wanted to be a game machine and a movie player, but didn't exactly excel at either. As a game unit, it didn't have a very good controller, nor did it have the graphics hardware to do anything particularly interesting. It couldn't even scroll images without it being choppy. As a movie player, it was kind of cool because this was before DVDs. Unfortunately, the movies were roughly VHS quality and you had to swap discs, at least the audio was really good on it.
So yes, the PS2 was supposed to 'do the same thing' as a DVD player, but they didn't focus it on that, and the consumer got burnt. Fortunately for most consumes, DVD players are cheap enough (even considered a household item) so a lot of people just didn't care.
Re:Other suit (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if you meant it could have been more successful without any but the first ability, I still dont' believe your statement. The PS2 is the most successful console in the past several years and three years on it is still selling like hotcakes compared to the competition. None of the above secondary abilities (DVD, PSX compatibility, Linux distro) have necessarily made it sell any better (although DVD and PSX were important to me, and others) but they certainly haven't hurt it either.