[quote name='GuilewasNK']Hehe, I hope you don't mind me quoting that in my signature. :lol:[/quote]I'm flattered. Go for it.
[quote name='Zen Davis']tHEY kILLED LIK SANG[/quote] And Bleem.
I like some Sony products. Their tube tvs were some of the best consumer models out there for decades.
The Playstation came into the vg arena and helped push gaming foward to a more mainstream hobby, where it was more niche and child-oriented up to that point. The Playstation 2 was the most over-rated of current gen (now last gen) systems, but Sony's relationship with developers helped them immensely. Their massive library (and backwards compatibility) was key in capturing a huge fanbase, pulling large numbers from Nintendo and alas, Sega.
The Playstation Portable is a nice handheld, with a decent sized number of games, but many who have purchased the system wound up disenfranchised with the number of straight ports from desktop to handheld and no great stand-alone titles to make their investment worth while from a gamers' point of view. Coupled with the cost of UMDs, and the smaller and smaller ipods and MP3players which do music and video, the PSP (designed to not be solely a gaming handheld, but also a music/video handheld) is having some problems.
The Playstation 3 is a nice piece of hardware, overpriced for those looking at it strictly for gaming. It's fair priced when contrasted with blu-ray players, but blu-ray is a component which Sony is truly concerned with at the moment. They are vying for the next-gen industry standard in video format, after losing out after two decades of failed R&D time and money. They do not want to lose this to Toshiba's HDdvd.
So much of their effort in the PS3 is from the angle of pushing blu-ray, blu-ray, blu-ray. Had their PS3 team been focused more on the video game consumers' desires, and re-building bridges with vendors and consumers (after estranging themselves through arrogance over the years) the sony-fanbase would still be as strong as it was say, four years ago.
But great games will come. At this point it will be interesting to see what will remain exclusive, and what will cross into MS and Nintendo territory. Because even with the slight advantage that the PS3 has over the 360 for elements such as AI and some rendering, if a game is available on the wii and 360, and people already have that system, they're going to buy it on that system they already own.
Basically, the opposite of the PS2 effect. People had the Playstation 2, so they'd buy the inferior ps2 port of BreadMaker eXtreme Yeast, rather than buy an xbox or gc to play the same game with optimized graphics or framerate.