"Look the obvious is right here, sony will do well when the price drops, I doubt they will be king again but when the price drops the PS3 will be fine."

Well, Sony will be selling more consoles, yes, but losing even more money on each one out the door. With the current timid sales, money blown on exclusivity contracts, and massive dollar losses on each console sold have added up to 2 billion dollars in losses in the gaming division.

The one thing a console needs to see the upper end of it's potential is lots and lots of games, good or bad. The more developers making different games for any particular console helps the development community to better learn how to take advantage of the hardware. If only the big-budget devs are using Sony's tools to make PS3 games, instead of optimizing their own toolchains and libraries, the PS3 isn't going to improve as a platform within it's life. If it's not economical to spend R&D budget on making these new development tools because they will work better for your games than the ones sony distributes because you had to spend $20k plus per development kit for each of you 30 coders, it's hard to make money. And games, from a business standpoint, exist to make money. While I have no doubt Sony's console will have new games clear to the end of it's life cycle, those games aren't going to push the sony hardware to it's potential because it's not going to be economically feasible to do so. Remember before the console launches, when Sony's suits were talking about game prices? They were talking like $80-$100 was going to be norm, in order to fit into their business model. The problem with the PS3 is that the only discernible effect of their new high powered console is new, high powered overhead. Microsoft is doing comperable graphics (currently) for less money, and still losing less money per box sold. Sony's future-proof tactic is a lark, because the MS gaming division is going to release a new box in five years, absolutely, positively. And it will probably support both blu-ray and HDDVD, if no format comes out on top before then, and have a feature set that puts the PS3 to shame, as well as capitalizing on everything that the game industry learned from the PS3 about multithreading and simultaneous processing in the Cell unit. So Sony's PS3 is only futureproof in a vacuum.

What am I saying, Sony already has a console that lasts ten years: The PS2.

Well said Stripe. Well done.

Three? What am I going to do with three? Enough people hate me because of what I do with the first one.

sony of course knows the ps3 is priced in such a range that it will turn off a lot of people, but that wasn't really their game, now was it? there's way more to be made off of the blu-ray royalties. their push to place the blu-ray drive into ps3's came with a steep cost -- loss of market place, but if blu-ray takes off and it can be attributed to the ps3, sony wins no matter what. sucks for the ps3 fans if the console fails, but sony will have made considerably more from blu-ray royalties. if both succeed, then it will have been a fantastic strategic move.

In the past, Sony used the Playstation to help the rest of the company be profitable. Right now, Sony is using profits from the rest of the company to help the Playstation. Nothing stays the same forever. GM is a perfect example of that. Am I saying that Sony is doomed? Hell no. Am I saying that Sony will win? Not necessarily.

Sony has an uphill battle on nearly all fronts. The biggest things they have going for them right now are 1st party titles and their name brand. I've actually been really impressed with their ability to consistently improve the PS3 with firmware updates and I encourage them to keep it up. The games are coming; we know that.

Sony's biggest problem right now is that price. It's put them in a very tough position. On one hand, they could lower the price which would increase the install base, but this would (temporarily) put them in a bigger financial hole. On the other hand, they could keep the price the same, but the install base wouldn't be as high and it would be harder to sell those ever-important exclusives to developers and publishers.

I've seen some great possibilities with games as well, such as GTHD (which is really just a demo). The problem is, it costs so much to make a quality full retail game like that on the PS3. There is a balance that must eventually be reached if the PS3 is to ultimately succeed. Price of game * games sold must be <= cost of development. I don't think the price of games will go up. The number of games sold depends on the install base. Over time, cost of development will decrease while the install base increases. This is that balance I was referring to earlier. I think the biggest question here is: when will that happen? 2008? 2009? Will it finally get there around the same time as the next Xbox is getting ready to release?

Everyone reading this right now is the minority of gamers. We all want a PS3, I'm sure. Why wouldn't we want access to all games and gaming features? It's not going to be any of us that decides when this will happen. It's going to be all those other people out there (the ones that are killing for a Wii). Personally, I don't expect those people to contribute much while the console has a $600 price tag.

If Blu-Ray wins, I expect standalone players to be cheaper than the PS3 by the time the masses have figured out that they want one, so I don't expect many of those people to go buy a PS3 when a standalone player is half the price. The PS3 will hit the critical market when people want it as a gaming machine. I wish Sony the best of luck.

Oh and by the way...about the exclusivity contracts

Microsoft being the shifty folk that they are have not had to worry much about being exclusive because for the whole time before the PS3 there was no competition. So what if a few games come out on the PS3 and the 360. The lag between release dates will always give MS an edge...

Where MS lacks in the video game department they make up for in Bill Gates evil empire EXP points

@BuckF1tches: Well said. I personally think that once the price comes down to a more competitive level, developer support and games will surge. I'm actually hopeful that this will happen - I love my 360, but it doesn't serve every facet of game genre equally.

@Crunshii: I disagree. The only time technical specs honestly come into play is in press releases and fanboy arguments. Sony has their first-party dev studios, MS has theirs - that alone differentiates a purchase enough for most consumers. Games tend to drive hardware sales more than technical specs.

Besides, I have my doubts about how much of the available capacity of a BD-ROM will actually be used for most games. All of those assets cost money to develop, and if they aren't necessary, developers won't create them just to boast 50 gigabytes of data on the disc. This also leads to some concern that we'll see BD-ROMs stuffed to the brim with 1080p video cutscenes, akin to the FMV nightmare Sega CD experienced when developers could suddenly use decent quality video clips in games.

We'll see. More capacity is better than less, but I for one don't appreciate being leverage for a new storage format. That does tint my opinion of the Playstation 3 and Sony, but if the games roll in and the price comes down, I can forgive. I still don't have to buy Blu-Ray movies, after all.

Screw this comment section.