The battle between competing video games consoles has become inextricably intertwined with the imminent high-definition DVD format war that pits Sony and the backers of the Blu-ray standard against Toshiba’s HD-DVD technology.

On Wednesday, Sony blamed a six-month delay to the launch of PlayStation 3 in Japan on a setback over the finalisation of the copy protection technology standard for the Blu-ray disc drive that will be included in the PS3.