1.  How many people do you think use their iPhone for strictly gaming?  I'll go out on a limb and say none.  It's a phone first and for most.  I would even say that probably half or more NEVER play games on it.  Now, if you want to go with the iPod Touch, than that would be fine, as the main draw of that was it's capability to play more advanced games.  And as of April 2010, Apple had only shipped 35 mil of them.  That's a little over half of what the PSP has shipped.  So no, Sony is in 2nd place.

3.  You do realise that MS probably has the same amount of, if not more, people they have to pay for the 360, right?  And yet, they were able to get the price of the Arcade to $199 about 2 years ago and $149 recently.  The situation with the PS2 wasn't much different than the PS3, either.  They teamed with Toshiba for the CPU.  They also had to pay Rambus for its RDRAM.  And God only knows what other parts are third party.

As far as the DVD and Blu-ray royalties go, I don't believe you have to keep paying over and over with each player you produce.  If memory serves me right, it's a one time licensing fee for the right to produce the player, with maybe a small % per disc if you produce/sell those.  And considering Sony had a part to play in the creation of DVD and Blu-ray, I doubt they have to pay anything.

The only reason PS3 was so high to begin with, is because Sony invested a lot of time and research in the advancement of TWO techs.  The Cell architecture and Blu-ray.  However, as both of those mature over the next couple of years, the prices will drop incredibly.  We will eventually see Blu-ray players for $50.  And many movies have already dropped to prices comparable to their DVD equivalent (usually only a $5 difference).  And the advancement of the Cell will mean a cheaper, better version of it in the PS4.

Didn't you say you were sticking to the Nintendo forum. 

Besides, don't act like that wasn't what you were insinuating.

Yeah I was just teasing (and didn't realize there was 100 posts since then :p).

1. By that metric how many people play games on the PSP? The attach rate suggests that fewer than half of the PSPs are actively used for gaming. Between the iTouch iPhone and iPad I believe they are over 100M shipped. The hardware is simply a means to sell software, since Apple has higher revenue and higher sales thats the most important part. Usually hardware is focused upon because software tends to follow hardware shipments quite closely, this however isn't the case with the PSP which sells 1/3rd of the software the PS3 and Xbox 360 do respectively.

3. The Xbox 360 is simpler by design, its more similar to the PS2 than the PS3 is to the PS2 in respect to being able to lower the production costs to the absolute minimum. In addition to this they have a better source of revenue than Sony because their Xbox Live subscriptions are worth as much as selling one first party game to every console on average every year. The PS3 will remain a complicated/more expensive design for the forseeable future because they have two 128 bit memory buses, Blu Ray, HDD in every SKU and Nvidia are bitches in regard to royalties.

They do have to pay the Blu Ray consortium then another division gets the payback from royalties after expenses are taken out, the reason why Sony pushed the PS3 with Blu Ray is because they hold something like 90% of the frabrication plants under their own control and their patents relate to the disc itself and not the players. Unfortunately they only turned a profit with these recently.

I'm no tech guy or anything, but I do know that if the PS3 is still selling a lot for Sony years from a now, I think Sony is smart enough to drop the price to $ 149 eventually and then to $ 100. I doubt it would stay at   $ 200 when the PS4 releases. If Sony sees the Ps3 selling when the next gen starts, I'm pretty sure they don't see the PS3 being $200. They're not stupid enough to believe that.

The XBox 360 is not the dominant console of the generation ... If the Wii launched in 2005, sold like it did from launch, and the XBox 360 and PS3 launched a year later with similar sales to what they had from launch, Nintendo's market-share would be much larger at the expense of the HD consoles. Being first to market does not ensure success, but releasing after the market leading console is deadly.

1.  It doesn't really matter if PSP software sales are low (except for in Japan), though.  It just shows not many people are buying new games.  The point is the main reason to even get a PSP is for gaming, regardless if people continue to use them.  And it's not really fair to add in a phone to the mix, as people who have no intent to play games on it can and will still buy it.  It's one of the reasons this site doesn't even track their sales.  Now, if the PSP2 ends up being a phone, then the comparison can be made.  And just to correct your estimate, iPod Touch plus iPhone sales equaled 85 mil shipped in April 2010.

2.  I would like to see any links you have for any royalties Sony has to pay to the Blu-ray Association.  Now, according to their website, the Board of Directors do have to pay a $50,000 annual fee.  However, seeing as Sony is also part of the Blu-ray Founder Group (along with Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Thomson, LG, Hitachi, Sharp, and Samsung), I would imagine they would have those fees waived.  I could be wrong, though.  As far as the price for the PS3 goes, you do realize that Sony took a device that cost them approximately $840 to produce, and in only 4 years have now got that cost down to under $299.  This will only continue to drop.  And while I'm pretty sure we'll never see a $99 PS3, a $199 (or even $149) model is definitely not out of the question.  In fact, I'd say we only got about a year and a half to 2 years before we see a $199 model.

My prediction has always been PS4 coming out last of the three, with Nintendo 6 and Xbox 3 coming out in a photo finish against one another.

In Sony's case, they care more about money and will want to optimize their PS3 investments, and there's going to be less pressure to jump immediately into the next generation technoligically. Microsoft needs to do it for rebranding purposes (if they ever want to seriously contend for expanded market action), and problems in Japan are going to force Nintendo to move by the end of 2011

But the next Xbox isn't going to be that much stronger than what we have. 4 GB of system RAM at absolute most, for instance, so there will be the possibility that next-gen games will at least be scalable to PS360 levels, at least.

1. Fair or not, they had twice as much revenue than the PSP for gaming in the U.S. and are growing significantly. Its all the proof anyone needs to say that more games are bought and played on an Apple system than a Sony portable. Its the same deal with Windows PCs. Even if most people don't play that many/any games, its still a bigger gaming platform than the PS3 for instance. The market is a software market not a hardware market, and this distinction is becoming even more important given the growing non game use of the current home consoles as well.

2. They went from terrible yields on their chips and expensive prototype components and reduced the price considerably over time with die shrinks and the ramping up of production of their various component parts. The cost curves are always steepest at the start of the generation and they begin to level out over time. At the start of the generation if they paid $30 per console in royalties to various places it would make up a small proportion of their sale price. At $300 its 1/9th, assuming a small margin for retail as an example. This means that the other components must make ever bigger reductions in cost to compensate for the fixed costs within the console.

As for royalties, its a simple assumption that they pay the same as everyone else.  http://www.avrev.com/forum/blu-ray-software/3170-blu-ray-royalties-plunge-lowering-costs-both-players-discs.html

$199 is still exceedingly cheap for the technology which is inside the PS3. They will at some point also want to make money on the console as well which is why I consider that price to be the realistic floor price. The PS3 in many ways will remain higher cost because of its legacy as a over-engineered magnificent piece of technology. I will have to say that because the Xbox 360 can be made as a system on chip with only one memory bus and the fact that Microsoft has the Live revenues they can and will price their console cheaper than Sony. The Xbox 360 IS cheap, it will always be cheaper because Microsoft IS cheap!

I think that we could see fairly substantial improvements in processing power in the next generation, but the added demands on these systems along with the diminishing returns of graphical technology will ensure that this improvement is perceived as small.

What I mean is that many of the best looking HD games did not actually render at HD resolutions (they were close to 720p, but below it) and they struggled to make 30fps; and in the next generation a lot of developers will be targeting 1080p and 60fps or 3D@720p, which requires a lot more processing power but not in a noticeable way. To make matters worse, if you doubled the number of polygons and doubled the texture detail that the Playstation could render it would have resulted in a noticeable and dramatic improvement in visuals; but a comparable improvement to the XBox 360 or PS3 would be seen as being a minimal improvement.