Do you predict a tight race between 360 and PS3 next year?

[nightsurge]

I think it will be a repeat of 2008, honestly. Sony wins the first 8 months, MS wins the last 4 to take the whole year. Sony is already on 45nm chips and have drastically shrank their hardware. They won't be able to cut costs much more from this point on.

The 360 on the other hand is sitting at basically 75% of the original launch price. 4 years and only $100 off (the Elite now is the same as an updated Pro). They have 45nm die shrinks left, Valhalla rumored single chip CPU/GPU, and plenty of room for motherboard and hardware casing shrinking. If MS as of 3 years ago was making $75 profit per system sold (old figure but I can find links to it if you want), they have to be raking in huge profit margins right now on the Elite, and at least breaking even or making small profits on the Arcade as well. They've had 2 more hardware revisions since that $75 profit figure and only dropped the price by ~$100 across the board.

Then we have all that combined with MS's commitment to make this year a knock-out punch of a year. They will be going much larger on advertising of games, especially the new IP Alan Wake, and then when Natal comes around, it will see the attention, advertising, and media coverage of a brand new console launch! That combined with huge cost reductions could see $200 Xbox 360 Elites with bundled Natal and $99 Xbox 360 Arcades. At 5 years in, those prices are more than reasonable. Then in 2011 the Elite could drop to $149, then $99 in 2012 for the end of the generation (Arcade discontinued in 2011). By 2012, the PS3 will still cost about double the 360 because they acted far faster than normal to get the large cost savings from a Slim and are still selling for a loss of $30-50 per console (im estimating).

The way I see it, the PS3 swing back this year was only larger than Xbox 360's last year because it was a combo punch of $100 price cut, Slim redesign, and huge advertising push. Next year MS will repeat the process and gain back any lost ground. By generation's end, I predict the Xbox 360 will still have outsold the PS3 by a minimum of 5 million consoles.