HappySqurriel said:
I would use a slightly different analogy ... The PS3 is in a school system which doesn't allow a student to be held back regardless of performance. The PS3 failed to learn the alphabet in kindergarden and because of that failed to learn how to read in grade 1; it is now entering grade 2 without the necessary skills needed to perform well in that grade. There is nothing that says they can't graduate from college with honors, but right now it will have a difficult time graduating high-school without some sort of intervention. |
This is a solid analysis of the situation.
No one in the world would have predicted the PS3's current status if they were predicting pre-E3 2005. Even up to the PS3's launch, very few people would predict the PS3 would do as poorly as it has so far. From that perspective, there's no way you can't consider the PS3 a miserable failure so far -- it started the 'next gen' with the foregone conclusion of dominating this generation. And it has gone from there to "will it pass the Xbox 360 and avoid last place this generation?" with no strong prospects for generating a profit in the first few years.
If you consider what momentum does for you in an industry as monolithic as the games industry, this is almost unbelievable. It commonly takes developers 24-36 months to release new games, and in the 10 months since the PS3 and Wii have launched, a slew of developers have shifted development efforts away from the PS3. If the industry was more agile, there'd be far fewer games on the PS3 right now than the meager offerings it has.
