Is just the only way Microsoft going to be able to compete with PS3. I honestly don't see Natal accomplishing anything, nor Move. Just a gimmick that the general audience won't even know exist. Xbox 360 price drop is only way they going to keep sales higher. As I said and you pointed out, most Xbox 360 owners bough a second Xbox because first broke, that means they have new Jasper version which is less likely to break. That means they loosing around half their market(rebuyers), in other word a decline in sale.
Halo: Reach is the last Xbox 360 exclusive worth talking about, once that is gone, then what? Gears of War is already oversaturated, Alan Wake was a failure. I'm not saying the games suck, I'm refering to mass appeal into purchasing a console. Microsoft suffers from lack of first party syndrome and it will hurt them badly in the coming years. They going to have to keep buying publishers exclusivity but even that is failing now because the PS3 audience is getting too big to be ignored. Most companies make more profit on the PS3. Everyone knows PS3 is only going in the rise right now, expect Microsoft to play very aggresive with pricing.
Developers are shifting lead to PS3 but thats mostly because its easier to port to Xbox 360. In term of game difference it just means they can make games equally good in both console. But thirdparty games will never match the quality of first party because they must keep the limitation of 2 consoles in mind. RPG suffer the most from this, FFXIII insane compression on the Xbox version is a example. I'm willing to bet if they had intented to make it for two consoles from the start they would of made both 720p just to lower the toll on the processors and storage. In fact im willing to bet their next RPG if its multiplataform will be 720p. For those who still doubt it the Xbox version of FFXIII is less than 720p. Just the disk limitation alone is a issue. Developers dont like making multi-disk. Say a game is 200mb too much for 1 disk. They going to just cut a bit of the game out to make it 1 disk. Storage limit is a issue when you have limited budget. Microsoft charges for making games more than 1 disk. Cutting cost is nothing new. It probably has happen many times and you would never know because they would never go out and say it. Just like movies get cut to make space in teathers in order to increase sales PROFIT.
