Amazon.com feels bad you bought an HD DVD player, so here's $50

Still reeling from the recently concluded format war?

Lucky for some early adopters, the number of retailers lining up to ease your pain is growing: first Best Buy, then Wal-Mart, and now Amazon. The online retail giant is currently offering a $50 credit for every HD DVD player purchased on its site. The offer is good until April 9, 2009, for HD DVD players bought before February 23, when Toshiba said it would stop making the devices.

Amazon gives $50 credit to early HD DVD adopters.

(Credit: Toshiba)

Gizmodo has posted the e-mail sent to some Amazon customers on Tuesday. I've excerpted the best parts:

"New technologies don't always work out as planned. We at Amazon.com value our customer relationships more than anything and would like to support customers who purchased these players by offering a credit good for $50 off any products sold by Amazon.com...In addition, we'd like to share some of our top offers on Blu-ray discs, HDTVs and other high-def technology..."

This is surely a smart way to build goodwill with your existing customers when a technology becomes obsolete. And what better way to lessen the sting of money lost than by offering the cool salve of the opportunity to spend more money?

Best Buy launched a similar program last month, rewarding $50 to customers who purchased the doomed devices. Wal-Mart said Tuesday it is extending its return policy from 90 days to 6 months on HD DVD players.

All of them, it should be noted, still sell HD DVD players and/or movie titles.

[mikeburek]

tech proof me

If there are many more of these, then I'm going to start just buying any old hardware and ask for some money back because what I bought went out of style.

[mikeburek]

buying incentive

I guess there is a real reason for this, though. For anyone who doesn't want to buy a new BluRay player, this will help bring the cost of the player back down to the pre-gouging price. (Since BluRay increased prices after they "won the war") Also, there is might be a big markup on media discs, so maybe people will use this to buy enough BluRay discs that they decided they want to keep buying the HD versions with their own money.

[smokified]

Simple answer

The reason for this is people do not want to accept responsibility for themselves. They knew there was a format war (if they did not, it would be their fault for no reasearching their purchases), so they should have understood that there was the risk of this happening.

Now all of the people who were either advised to buy HD DVD players or the people who thought they knew it all and went out and bought one because they were just so sure that BluRay would not catch on are going to these stores and complaining that they wasted their own money.

These stores do not have the obligation to give anyone anything. They are just doing it because other stores are doing it and that is how business works.

[computerking12661]

First off, obviously, with the PS3 having a BluRay player built in, and the fact that Sony uses bluray for their games, BluRay wasn't going to disappear, and second, you go out and buy a PS3 game, and your supporting the BluRay format.