Well, if I read these statemments I can only scratch my head about the analysts.
IMHO the miss several critical points and simply ignore them:
First of all: A gaming console is sold primarily for games. If you have good games for it they will sell the plattform, if thze price is r4eachable for them.
Second the PS-3 is not only a gaming console but also a BluRay Player. But while this helps at the moment this influence will decrease with price drops of stand alone players. Its role as a BluRay player will probably not sell the PS-3 much longer than one or two years. Then it will have to stand as a pure gaming console.
And there is the problem. The PS-3 has to live and find its place with games. But for the game producers there is only one calculation: How many games can I sell for what price and how much does the development cost.
And there is the problem of the PS-3. While its architecture offers in theory a significant advantage compared to the Xbox 360 its architecture makes it much more complicated to release this power. It is even a quite expensive challenge to release so much power as the Xbox 360 offers.Its an even bigger challenge if you want to use higher level functions, which is necessary to hold the development costs in check on the bigger plattforms.
The Xbox 360 on the other hand has a quite significant advantage; its architecture contains a simple triple core. If you find a good solution for the Xbox 360 it will work on a PC quite as good. They can share parts of their development costs, especially if you use Nicrosoft SDKs. The Wii on the other hand is less complicated. Even a small (and therefore cheap) team can make a sigbificant game on this plattform.
And now look at the market shares of the plattforms. If you consider their costs the current situation looks quite bad for developers, that targeted mainly the PS-3 The best course of action might be to delay the release (in the hope that there will be more PS-3s sold, or go the multi plattform way. It is cheaaper to develop for the other plattforms. While the PS-3 sold more consoles in Japan than the Xbox 360, its attachement rate is quite bad. It simply doesn't pay to write PS-3 games for the japanese market only at the moment. At the moment the most decent approach might be to simpüly wait and watch how the PS-3 will cope. But there is a considerable danger for the PS-3: The more companies choose this approach the less games for the PS-3 are there, and the less attractive the PS-3 will look. Even if they lower their price, they can be sure that the Xbox 360 will reply in the same style, but Microsoft doesn't have to face such losses per console. If they don't have games that sell the PS-3 in significant numbers at the lower price, the PS-3 will be in serious trouble because more and more developers would drop the PS-3 support.
