MikeB on 02 January 2010
@ Squilliam
In my technical opinion the PS3 was too much too early as far as technology. The technology in the PS3 only became an appropriate price to sell in late 2007 so releasing later if they had to have both would have been better as history and the market has shown us that a lot of people would have simply waited for the PS3 to be released. Releasing sooner at a higher price just gave a lot of people the justification to jump ship as they could judge what the PS3 was about and decided at that point it was too expensive for their needs.
If it would have been possible, releasing a year ealier at twice the price would be my preference if that would mean developers and people would have had 1 year extra to adapt to the Cell.
IMO releasing later from a technical perspective would be a weak argument based on just entry pricing (last year's expensive top level gaming PCs are also today's entry gaming models). IMO the 360 could better have been released 1 year later if that would have meant better built quality. IMO that was of way more severity.
The only good reason I can think of to release the PS3 later was IMO the firmware, which wasn't yet as solid as it should have been (a software issue and that's much less severe than bad hardware built quality)
I would say that a PS3 with no Blu Ray but with the Cell processor and similar architecture would have been the better bet as the Cell processor would likely be very good at procedural generation of game assets to make up for a smaller DVD capacity.
Although the Cell is most excellent for procedural synthesis, it also complicates things a lot more than anything else and the end quality of normal assets is usually better.
I would have preferred the 360 to launch 1 year later (better built) and include a Blu-Ray drive, so there would be less noise generation / eliminate disc scratching problems. And with both the PS3 and 360 having Blu-Ray drives I believe this would have pushed many more game developers towards the integration of seamless streaming engines like seen with Uncharted 2, higher quality assets and fewer game design sacrifices.
The 360 may have sold less going such a route, but IMO from a technical perspective this would have been great for pushing the market forward.
