Sony Uses PS3 Magazine As Blu-ray Trojan Horse

Well, it’s one way to drive Blu-ray take-up. In what it says is a world first, the Official PlayStation Magazine in the UK will, from its June edition, dropped the cover-mounted DVD it has offered for the last eight months and switch to the new hi-def discs. The magazine’s publisher, Future, has had a licensing deal with Sony for the last 12 years and also publishes official Windows magazines for Microsoft, so the move is not so much an editorial decision to back the new format as a marketing ploy. SCEE UK MD Ray McGuire, quoted by Future’s Next Generation webzine: “The high capacity of Blu-ray media is the perfect method to distribute large volumes of unique existing, and user-generated content in HD, showcasing PS3’s multimedia capabilities to the full.” Playstation Universe first spotted an ad for the disc in last month’s magazine, stating: “No other magazine can do this.”