every year this gets sadder and sadder

next february when wii is closing in on 50mil and ps3 is trying to get to 25 mil will we STILL be having this conversation?

home and littlebigplanet?

$200 off the price and games they give a shit about.

Things like Home and LBP won't appeal to casuals because they require taking your system online, something casuals don't do a lot of.

 The question becomes do they keep it simple to make it usable?  Or fall into the temptation of 'I have all this power, I can make it do a lot more than just...'  Such as, instead of play the Blu-Ray movie have playing the movie just be one out of a hundred options that you can do.  And to encourage you to use the others options, I'll put 'Engage Movie' as number 83 on the list. 

First, I want to echo Flagships comments about Home and LBP. Casual gamers generally don't go on-line ... so on-line games will not draw them.

Second, and more importantly, it appears that Sony really does not get casual gaming. Look at Phil Harrison's statements (before he left) praising Nintendo. They wanted bigger, better, bolder. They got it ... but they seem to have left the Singstar and Buzz crowd (which helped make them a top seller -- especially in Europe) behind.

Mike from Morgantown

 Thats the problem, most of the people didn't care of those features... for a lot of people wasn't a heck of a deal at 600 or 500, they think that is too much for a game console, no matter what can it do...

You love it and thats fine, but the world don't agree with you, lower price, less features (no BC, smaller HD, less usb ports, no card readers) had a lot better effect than the whole 600-heck-of-a-deal pack...

It can have all the technological advantages of the world, but for most of the costumers, is just a game console... 

its not "casual" gamers they need to have....it's mass market appeal that they need. With blu-ray, much like DVD at the time, people will be able to have a piece of hardware with movie playback, along with video games to play. I said this some time ago, but the PS2 was a lot of peoples first dvd player, and the same should happen with PS3 and Blu-ray.....when HD reaches the masses, and Blu ray sales shoot up, expect PS3 sales to jump as well....I mean, it has already been outselling the 360 in NA.........

bluray is nothing like dvd

dvd offered FUNCTIONALITY improvements over vhs
bluray just offers better video/audio

people still haven't been able to give ONE example of technology overtaking the old due solely to superior audio/video...but i can give a counter-example: mp3 players are worse quality than cds but have overtaken them due to the FUNCTIONALITY upgrades

also, over 50% of hdtv owners don't even hook up an hd source to them
and 25% think they are watching hd content when they aren't

people buy hdtvs because they are flat and can hang on the wall...the mass consumer doesn't care enough about hd

and dvd already looks better than sdtv on hdtvs, so people who have a plasma without hd hooked up into it (most of them) see that their dvd is better than normal tv and wonder "why?" if asked about upgrading to bluray

bluray will take off when it's

Casuals like affordable pricing, and casuals like OFFLINE multiplayer, so you can play the game with your family. Casuals don't go online unless it's for Snood or e-mail.

Online games won't win casuals. Sony priced themselves out of the casual battle, and the casual battle is the battle that wins the war every single generation. They're fighting for 2nd, and since Microsoft is still opting out of the Japanese race, it looks like Sony will get 2nd eventually. Worldwide, but not in the U.S.



And FastRabbit09's right. I have an HDTV, and the only things I have hooked up to it are my Wii, my DVD player, and my VCR. I still rock VHS. I'll upgrade to HD content as soon as more pixels means more fun. I bought my TV for the inches, not for the pixels.

It depends how you define casual.

I can think of at least 4 kinds.

1. Those interested in Blu-Ray mostly, but who may pick up a game or two. For these guys it's already enough.

2. A second group of casuals is the "i just don't buy a lot of games" casual, those will just come with time as the price lowers. If you buy less software, the hardware is generally going to need to be cheaoper for you to adopt.

3. Sports casuals, the guys who only buy sports games. In Europe, just being a playstation console seems to be enough to get most guys on bored. In the US this seems nearly impossible for the PS3 to catch back up to. 360 seems like THE madden console and I don't see that changing as "proffesional" and "hardcore" Madden gaming center around the 360. (See Madden Nation on ESPN.)

4. New Causals, The ones who have just recently bought a Wii because it's new, interesting and different. Once again another group that's going to be hard to reach, even new products are going to go unnoticed by this group and they aren't used to throwing down lots of money for consoles as it is.