[lord_carbo]

IMO Sony has ****ed up.

First of all, avaliability for the holidays. All the kids will be asking for PS3s. Parents, being so uninformed and unwilling to actually look stuff up to satisfy their kids, will go into stores expecting a moderately stocked, moderately priced system. "Opps lol, all sold out, and really expensive anyway". So what is moderately stocked and priced? The Xbox 360, and, even cheaper (although possibly not as stocked), the Wii. How many units they'll have by the end of the year doesn't matter as much as how many units they'll have by the time holiday shopping is at its peak. I'm pretty sure that 70% of the people who haven't preordered a PS3 already and will buy one aren't going to be buying one after they do their holiday shopping (I mean, mommy is always trying to please little Tommy and will spend $1000s of dollars to do so, hence why there are goddamn 9 year olds with cell phones and 60 GB video Ipods these days).

Add in all the gaming nerds willing to spend all the money and also know when all the stocks come in or even preordered it, not too many parents are going to be spoiling their child this year. I also won't be suprised if there's are PS3s not being yanked off shelves on sight by the time 2007 arrives.

Now this moment of time is going to be the deciding factor for the PS3. The developers who still haven't decided need to decide right away if they want to stick with the PS3 or not. If the Wii outsells the PS3 and the developers aren't totally stupid, chances are they'll scatter around Nintendo and Microsoft. If the PS3 just totally sucks even worse than I predicted for the holidays, they'll go to Microsoft.

And if that doesn't get to them, there's pricing. Games for the PS3 are going to be extremely expensive (when it comes to pricetag and, I'm assuming, production), and the PS3 is, alas, also overpriced. This is really really really bad for both producers and developers (especially for obscure developers). Games will just be too expensive to gorge on. Games like Psychonauts wouldn't even hit the shelves as a PS3 game, it would be just too damn expensive.

So yeah I expect the PS3 to do extremely badly throughout the first year. It might pick up again Christmas 2007, but Sony will probably lose a lot of developers in the process. That's what you get when you push the envelope and go for impractical technology.

Just a bit of unorganized and unrevised speculation.