My opinion - Sony's big mistake = PS3 launched too cheap

[MikeB]

To take this opinion seriously, there are some things to take into consideration,

1) Software developers, obviously there wouldn't be an install base of around 4 million users right now. This will hamper software developement. Development costs have gone through the roof (more complex games), so developing companies need to re-earn the costs.

2) A much smaller PS3 install base would also mean a much smaller Blu-Ray install base. Winning the high definition movie war is worth "losing" a couple of billions as an early investment by itself.

3) There would be less motivation to create software which truly take advantage of the PS3 strenghts, the Blu-Ray storage advantage, the SPE processing power advantage and the default harddrive advantage. PS3 owners would then mainly see subpar XBox 360 ports.

IMO such a situation would be similar as was the case with Amiga games developers. Due to a larger install base initially developers had to worry about their games playing well on the Atari ST as well. Later with the Amiga becoming dominant Amiga games really started to shine as developers were able to optimise their games for the Amiga's custom chips, features lacking on the Atari ST.

As Sony is still profitable, they are fully capable of absorbing the initial high costs. With these high specifications consumers will benefit for the longrun, though some may not be able to afford one right now. Selling the harddware at a loss enables software developers to develop PS3 optimised games due to a large enough install base, again benefitting current but also future consumers (they will have a better software library to choose from).