[Grant @ Jul 7th 2007 7:53PM]

i completely agree with you and josef f, the PS3 needs games more than anything to sell.

people would pay $600, but they need to see something that is worth $600, and no great(barely even a handful of good) games after more than half a year (almost 3/4ths) is not going to move anything.

Unfortunately, the wii is in a similar situation, but since it has more mainstream appeal and a much lower entry cost, it is still able to ride on it's minimal games list. Hopefully nintendo will pick up the pace and break their console tradition of releasing 3 or 4 worthwhile(albeit great) games, or soon they might find themselves in a similar slump.

Sony brought this on themselves though, they ignored and assumed themselves impervious to market conditions and simple business practices since the PS2 was such a success. They decided to pull a Field of Dreams and assume "if we make it, people will buy it". This ignored the fact that in the PS2 era, they did not have competition (the original xbox was more of a market test than a serious competitior) and assumed that the xbox 360 would continue to hold a similar market share and not be a competitor again. They assumed they didn't need to be developer friendly. They assumed they could build an $800 machine and sell it for $600 and people would see it as a "bargain". In the mean time, xbox 360 took note of all these issues, and it is doing very well. The only thing that stopped the 360 from dominating this round is the fact that it has had such an issue with the 3-rings-of-death, but with the recent increase in warrenty, that should seriously smooth over that issue.

As for the PS3, i want one, i want one for $450 at the most, and i want good games to play on it. Until Sony can deliver that, i don't think even the most hardcore gamers that are console neutral will be able to cough up the cash for one.

[Frangible @ Jul 7th 2007 11:04PM]

The PS2 had similar weak launch titles, and it did have competition- the Sega Dreamcast. I own a Dreamcast and it was an excellent system, looking better than the PS2 and its limited video memory in many respects. Yet it still failed, despite having (at the time) much better graphics and titles than the PS2. /mourn Sega's hardware division

The PS2 was very expensive when it was released, and like I said, due to programming difficulties the Dreamcast games looked better. What the PS2 had going for it was it was a DVD player, and could play PSX titles. The conditions for the PS3 are identical. The PS2 did *not* achieve widespread success initially, if nothing else, due to availability problems.

Yes, the PS3 is expensive, and I won't buy one until they're more like $400 and have more appealing games to me (though Ninja Gaiden Sigma looks tempting).

But the PS3 does have a failure rate of less than 1%, compared to the 360's ~35% failure rate. Sure, MS is giving us a 3 year warranty, but they're not fixing the underlying problem, will I even be able to play my 360 in 10 years? I doubt it.

The PS3 has absurdly good cooling, and is made in Japan. Part of that price is the quality that went into it. In the case of the PSP, they moved production from Japan to China to lower the cost to $170. Is Sony moving the PS3's production to China for the PS3's price drop here? Or will they do so in the future? And if they did, would you pay more to get an older made-in-Japan unit if the quality and failure rate were significantly better?

Considering the quality difference, and huge huge huge difference in failure rates between the 360 and PS3, I don't mind it costing more. It just needs a larger game library.