Epic Games 'actively lobbying' for more power in next gen consoles

[zarx]

Kresnik said:

Don't you see the differences between the situations though?  Sony launched a powerful console (but not the most powerful) a year earlier than the 'competition' with the PS2 - and although they were bested in terms of power, they easily won the market overall.

In this generation, the PS3 is the Xbox/Gamecube - releasing later and being more powerful, but not winning the market.  The 360 is more the PS2 of this generation but it hasn't the dominated the market to the same extent.

Plus, all the stuff you mentioned about stuffing the PS3 with too many features which it didn't need.  Which is why I see Sony trying to recapture what they did with the PS2 a bit more.  Although honestly I'm not sure you can really do that with the market the way it is - there's too much money for third-party companies making multi-platform releases.

Actually in Sony's eyes they were doing everything exactly the same, with the PS2 they added DVD which was a big selling point of the system (unfortuantely for them Blu-Ray didn't take off in the same way), they used complex powerful custom hardware that was the most powerful at the point of release so as to make ports harder (unfortunately MS pushed easy to develop for hardware and had money to burn to ensure that devs made 360 games). The PS3 was trying to recapture what the PS2 did, it just so happened that the market had changed.

The PS1&2 didn't really have strong competition, Sega was a mess and their own worst enemy with the Saturn which was hard to develop for and lacking in 2D performance, the N64 was expensive and games were expensive plus had poor 3rd party support due to Nintendo policies and the limitations and price of carts. The Dreamcast was dead in the water as Sega lacked the money to support it, the Gamecube suffered from poor 3rd party support and launching late, and the Xbox was a year late, expensive and had poor to no support from Japan as well as being a untested brand in the market. 

With the PS3 they over priced it, delivered it late and had poorer 3rd party support due to complex architecture vs competition and momentum of the 360. The 360 had a year head start plenty of huge exclusives and lots of money behind it and the west became the dominant force in game development, they also had much better online infrastructure and online became a huge part of the market. The Wii found an untapped market and stole a lot of the PS2 casual market and had lots of media attention and hype.