I have been working a pretty shitty job for the past 4 months or so, its a cold storage warehouse position and its extremely boring. I'm just sticking it out for a few more weeks before I move to the other side of the country, and I'm really looking forward to get away from it. But I feel like I had to share this with the community as it came as quite a surprise to me, just about everyone at this workplace owns a PS3, and theres a lot of people working there. Why is this a surprise? well I live in Australia and in my experience the Xbox 360 seems to have been the system of choice for the average gamer in this console generation.



My brother has one, my best friend has one, my step uncle has one, its heavily advertised and most people know about the console. So this came as a surprise to me, whats more surprising is that just about all of these guys are pretty casual gamers, mainly playing the macho type shooter. They're all playing GTA (who isnt?) but games like Turok have been mentioned, I think thats fairly telling of the sort of games they play. That these guys choose the most expensive system was a shock to me, but its all kind of makes sense, I mean these guys no doubt had PS2's and probably PS1's, its the system they know and a brand they can trust.

One of these guys was talking to me about his PS3, I asked what games he has, he responded "Ive got shitloads of games, mainly shooters." I felt like asking why he didnt have a 360, its the shooter machine, but he also had a shit hot PC and to me that made even less sense. I kow that one of the things that attracted me to the xbox was that I used to play alot of PC games and it seemed like a natural choice, his response to me owning a 360 was that he doesnt like Microsoft, fair point but still, weird.



I suppose what I'm saying is that in just about every country outside of the US, the PS3 is the "casual" machine. Its instantly recognisable as the next step in videogames, the average person knows the name, trusts the brand and thinks its the best purchase decision. In the US I think the 360 is the console thats seen in this way, because its an American console, average Americans trust that, and perhaps more importantly, it has Halo.

Now this is all a bit of guess work and specualtion, but I think its a definate trend and as the PS3 price drops further it will become more and more apparent. If people in Australia were willing to drop $1000.00 on one at launch then its probably pretty reasonable at $699.00 (yes we pay far too much in Australia).

So to conclude let me say that I own both systems and love both, this isnt a biased opinion, more like a stream of thought. Thoughts?

Cheers.