Because the Wii is currently dominating only because of the price drops it has experienced?  Oh wai...

There's a fundamental weakness to the argument that the Wii will stop selling well by 2009.  Perhaps it won't be as dominant on a per month basis because more people will be able to afford the PS3/360, but there will still be more people who want it.  Wii sports in particular, and motion control in general, interest casual gamers greatly.  Gamers who aren't even interested in gaming with a regular controller.

People stop by to visit my family a lot. When they stop by, we show them the Wii on a 50" 1080p set.  They don't think the Wii looks bad -- many of them don't know what video games are supposed to look like and neither do they care.   They act like they're humoring us to try it, but once they do they want to know how they can go out and buy one for $250.  They're very disappointed when they find out they can't go buy one just that night.

Those people won't change in two years.  If we brought the exact same people into our house and showed them the Wii just like that, they'd still want to pay $250 for it at the end of 2009.  The Wii sells itself once people try it, even casual and non-gamers.  By contrast, almost none of those particular people would be interested in Gears of War.  Gears of War is hardcore gamers' game, as is Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid.

People who say the Wii will die early this generation are fooling themselves.  The people who want a Wii now are part of the same set of people who'd want one in five years and would pay the exact same amount of money for it.  They're buying the Wii because they're discovering it, not because they are in to games and want a new system.

Many hardcore gamers also buy the Wii, of course -- the new control scheme is well worth the price of admission, especially for games like Godfather -- and perhaps they'll grow less interested in it by then.  But gaming's largest audience will be the one Nintendo built with the Wii and DS, and most of them will continue to love it.

Wow at Pachters World of Warcraft predictions. He totally just said that the game was going to die in under a year. And it went on to literally set records and is showing zero signs of slowing down. Jesus Christ man my god, this guy sucks.

Pachter makes these predictions after massive hangovers. The fact that people even know his name and talk about him baffles all logic and common sense.

SPOILER: PS3 won't win the 7th gen.

SPOILER #2: PS3 won't make it past the year 2009.

SPOILER #3: Sony may pack it up for the gaming business when PS3 fails. Kutaragi was the heart and soul of that division. Sony's sidelined him and are focused on keeping profitable divisions. How much Sony feels they want to fight as console underdog determines their future in this business.

John Lucas 

 That ain't happening.

Do you realise how much money Sony's gaming division is loosing, and how ridiculously far it is from making any of it back? Nintendo is a gaming company and will keep making games to the end, and Sega did just that, but Sony is primarily a general electronics company. If the Playstation brand keeps making losses for too many years straight, it's a completely plausible scenario that the suits in charge of the entire company pull the plug on the PS3, if not the Playstation product line alltogether.

Of course it's still a good bit more likely that sales for the PS3 will pick up a little after some good games come out during the next 6 months, and it'll stay alive for a pretty respectable life span. Hardly any third party exclusives of course, but Sony's first party games have been getting better.

We'll see wether the Playstation lives or not after New Year. 

 Keep saying that to yourself. PS brand gets thrown out cause one generation it doesn't win, after winning two in a row... Why would it make sense for Sony to leave the console business if they didn't do well enough for one generation. This isn't sega, sega was already a dying console maker when the Dreamcast came out...

Who knows how long Sony will hang on, the PS3's poor sales alone won't doom the console that's for sure, the only real x-factor is the company's uncertain financial future. And even then that's purely just speculation. While the some may use the argument that of the PlayStation's brandname being strong as a counter, we see it clearly wasn't strong enough to make the PS3 a success so its rather vague as to how far the "strength" of the brandname can carry the console beyond this point. Irregardless speculating on its demise is premature and malicious at best. It's one of those things we honestly can't predict with any certainty.

(on a side note) While price is an important factor to the Wii's success its naive to think that's its the console's only appeal and even more naive to think that the Wii won't drop in price as well though obviously we'll see the gap between it and its competitors shrink substantially I'm sure.

If Sony used Nintendo's marketing and sales model, I'd totally agree with you, Ck. The problem is that they use the same strategy that Microsoft uses, and Microsoft lost 3-4 billion dollars last generation, with a console that tracks in a very similar fashion to the PS3. 

You can say it's just one generation, sure. That's one viewpoint. Another viewpoint is that it is a potential loss of several billion dollars over the next 5-6 years, with no real garauntee that those losses will stop at that time. I'm in the "it's not likely, but it's possible" camp on this one, Ck.  

i doubt sony will cut the life support for ps3 even if it fails miserably.
if sony ditches ps3, people will completely lose faith and a chain reaction will happen to its other electronics.

The thing saving the PS3 is the PS2. As long as the PS2 still sells solidly, the PS3 is just a placeholder. Once the PS2 starts selling at current-PS3 levels, *that* is when you can start predicting how long PS3 has left. If, and *only* if, the PS3 can't pull sales above current levels for more than a year after PS2's "death," will it be reasonable to think Sony would cut and run, and by then the generation would be half-over, and I'd expect them to invest in a PS4 instead of pulling out entirely. Maybe re-invent the PlayStation brand like Nintendo did with Wii.