Over the last few days, several stores and media producers decided to abandon HD-DVD and now it has been confirmed that the greatest force behind the format has finally given up. The HD format war is over.
Toshiba, which developed the HD DVD format along with NEC then got it acknowledged by the DVD Forum, hasn't made an official announcement yet, but they have already started working on HD-DVD production termination.
According to Reuters, this will cost Toshiba losses in the range of tens of billions of yen (hundreds of millions of dollars).
On the gaming front, this news might give an additional boost to Playstation 3 sales. Playstation 3 features a Blu-Ray player and Sony has been marketing it as a home entertainment system rather than just a console. Xbox 360 comes with a standard DVD ROM drive and an HD-DVD drive can be sold separately.
Months ago, Microsoft announced that they might release an external Blu-Ray drive for Xbox 360 if Blu-Ray was to win the HD format war.