you are implying this gen people didn't have a choice? ridiculous, sorry. you *always* have a choice. and this gen most people decided to buy the wii and a lot (and more than expected) to buy an x360.

I dont see aligned launches. I see Xbox in 2013 with PS4 in spring 2014 at earliest. The rumormill for a 2013 PS4 simply as strong as it is for Xbox. PS3s exclusives in 2013 certainly dont help that theory that PS4 is in 2013.

But this gen was the first time in a while that people had a choice. PS1 and PS2 were so successful that their competition were almost niche in popularity. It was a dictatorship. Now Xbox and PS3 are about even in preference, with Wii enjoying success with a totally different market. This gen was the best one bar non in terms of choice.

aye, I never had a gun held to my head when I went and bought my Wii or my 360 at the start of this generation I just had the thought of how cool the wii was going to be introducting motion control and how awesome it was going to be to complete the original Halo trilogy. The only reason the playstation 3 wasn't a choice for me was there was no draw to buy it at launch, you gotta have something like Halo3 coming to finish off a story to make people want your system, I predict Ms will definately be doing that for the Xbox720 launch with Halo 5 in the pipeline for it.

As for Sony learning what the market wants.... now I love um and I love some of the stuff they make, but my god when sony thinks they got a good thing they stick to it til the bitter bitter end, just have awful thoughts of the Ps4 launching with the Dualshock 4 and Ridge racer ... 12? I dunno what number it's at but yeah when Sony finds a winner they literally ride it into the ground.

The thing that is going to hurt Sony here in what I've bolded is the regions where this is true, Xbox absolutely has the US market dominated, it's homeland and where it will launch first. But Sonys dominated zone is Europe where most Sony systems take from 3-9months to actually make it over here if you check the weekly sales of the Playstation 3 in Japan where the Playstation 4 will of course be making it's debut it isn't really a happy Sony market there at the moment.

well, it seems that one thing is for sure in this market: nothing is for sure. who would have thought this outcome at the beginning of this generation, when taking a look to last two gens? noone. next gen it all begins again. but what i like with this gen and what i have said several times: it's the *competition* that is important. i don't get it why people are p***ed when their favorite console is not first: do the games get worse? no, of course not. it's almost definitely the opposite: the studios developing exclusives put even more effort in their games.

At $599, the PS3 really wasn't a choice for most. Especially not kids.
Sames goes for the $400 Xbox 360 but to a lesser degree.

Cell? Naaaa

considering the huge fan-base sony had in the beginning of this gen, i think the price-advantage got off almost instantly. and kids? how do they have a choice? relatives buy consoles for kids, not the kids themselves.

While I agree with you that competition is absolutely needed for a market to move forwards I do think that being in first spot in terms of sales has massive advantages, if your console has only sold 1/4 that of the competitions then a 3rd party developer knows there is effectively 4 times less people to sell to on your system and as such will more than likely optimize the game to run smoothly on the system with the bigger group of people to sell to.

Worst case scenario of this is something like what you see happening to the Vita atm poor sales meaning 3rd parties not going to be sticking their necks out to make games for a system with little momentium behind it while they know that the 3rd is there with over 20million people gaming on it now literally makes your game 5 times easier to sell if you got 5 times the number of possible buyers.

The Ipad costs 500dollars yet sells millions of units quite a large amount are for teens.... no teen is shelling out that money themselves, it's stupid parents who foot the bill.