If you have a good product, with fixed costs,that is too expensive, that nobody is buying, you are losing money. Sony et al. know this only too well, it's why the DVD industry followed the pattern it did.
If you reduce the price and get SOME customers, and they tell other people "Hey this works, it's good." you'll get MORE sales, with LESS margin - but this is much better than no sales at all!
Also, drives aren't proper backup, unless they're offsite, and these discs pack 50GB each, more than enough for most discrete items on your 3TB drive (what do you need that for anyway, HD porn?)