In 97/98 there were many killer applications coming....now what is coming?
Resident Evil, Metal Gear, GTA and Tekken are already out....FFXIII in japan didn't performed as well as expected and it's not an exclusive anymore, Gran Turismo 5 has now the strong competiton of Forza Motorsport 3 on 360, God Of War didn't managed to sell more than 3.5million copies so far on Ps2, and I don't think it will do better with the much smaller Ps3's user base, heavy rain is an interesting game but it will unlikely appeal to the mainstream audience.
In 97/98 sony was making profit selling Ps1, at the actual moment they are still losing money underselling the Ps3.
The Ps1 was the most conviniet home console to consumers in 97/98 considering the price of console and the price of games (thanks to CDs), now Ps3 is the most expansive one thanks to blu-rays; a feature that I love but most people don't need, considering that the actual blu-ray share of the home video market is only beetween 10-15% while "on demand" video broadcasting market keeps growing.
One important reason that helped Ps1's large scale succes was the imponent advertisment campaign wich sony started in 96/97, playstation became a UEFA Champions League sponsor since then for example. Now that the playstation brand is well known to the world a new massive ad campaign won't have the same impact as it did in the past.
Ps3 is performing a lot worse than Ps1 at the moment.
