360 had everything done right, I doubt they could do it again.

I remember the games, Oblivion, Table tennis, Fight night, Gears of war, Halo 3, Forza 3, rainbow six vegas, dead rising, Test drive unlimited, call of duty 2, saints row, FEAR, Ghost recon - advanced warfighter, Hitman blood money, call of duty 3, the godfather, Battlefield 2, phantasy star, Prey, need for speed, project ghotam 3, condemned and many more. All of these games before the ps3 even came to Europe.

If you really liked videogames at all, you had to have a 360 back in 2005/2006, I'd have waited a couple months for ps3, but that was a huge library of games already available in HD graphics with a fantastic controller that had vibration, I paid 360pounds in UK, the ps3 was supposed to be 500pounds without controller vibration. And it was backwards compatible with a lot of games.

As much as I loved ps2, I had to go 360. I ended up buying a ps3 when uncharted came out.

The fact that in the end the ps3 still outsold the 360 is mind boggling to me as a real gamer who enjoys games. It makes no sense. Its as if people bought into the brand instead of the best library. More so when the xbox 360 played a lot of Xbox games such as Baldurs gate, Black, Batman begins, Burnout 3, colin mcrae4, commandos 2, Constantine, crimson skies, doom 3, Fable, Far cry instincts, GTA trilogy, Halo games, Jade empire, Max payne 1 and 2, Medal of honor, Ninja gaiden, Panzer dragon, Prince of Persia, red faction 2, return to castle Wolfenstein, Shenmue 2, silent hill 2, soul calibur 2, star wars games, and many many more.

PS - I do not believe Microsoft will ever again have that library advantage, sony will not let them. And I wont fall for the talks about several teams and games coming, I remember how they fooled me with the Xbox X because a couple games were cancelled. 

You would have had to be crazy to chose ps3 over 360 at least for the first 3 years. Specially if you play online, xbox live was way better than psn back in 2006.

Then Sony may have been learning from a PS3-like mistake this gen rather than the previous one.

Not sure it would have changed things much, other than giving Sony a little more of a decisive lead over MS. Nintendo still would have been the overall winner. A lot of the 360's sales in the beginning were driven by Xbox Live, which was a novelty back then, and then by Kinect in the second half of the generation, and I'm assuming PSN would still have its bare-bones structure compared to Live, along with the attendant issues that led to the infamous 2011 security breach and shutdown. The Sony Corporation as a whole was a complete basket case that a few more PS3 sales wouldn't have fixed. Sony's issues at the time were structural.

That eliminates two of PS3's biggest issues right there. Price and difficulty to program for. As the owner of both, it baffled me how large a lot of PS3 games were (in GB) compared to their Xbox 360 counterparts. Did any games really benefit from Blu Ray or the Cell?

Hindsight is 20/20 and, at the time, the PS3 looked like an unstoppable beast. It still sold well but I imagine, given a chance to do it all over again, Sony would have made some huge changes and saved a lot of money. Maybe even outsold the Wii.

Even at a higher price, the PS3 had some good selling points. HDMI and Wi-Fi at a time when XB360 offered neither out of the box. Free online (which I still believe was only free to combat the success of XBL Gold) offering the "meat" of what XBL had to offer, a decent web browser, Linux support, etc.

I agree XB 360 had the better library for a few years, the better price (again, offering the important stuff people wanted in a console) and a better online service. Plus the 360 just kept offering features the PS3 hardware got later or never got at all (ie: External HDD support).

That damn RRoD, lack of quality exclusives later in the gen, and gamers just being loyal to Sony in more parts of the world was just too much to overcome. Still, going from hardware that sold like 24m to 80m + is something to be proud of.

That was a hell of a war. Wonder if we'll ever see another like it?

Oh ya, the gen would have turned out much differently

Another alternative would be to release in late 2007, taking full advantage of the 65 nm node, Nvidia's Tesla GPUs etc. and basically try to make the X360 the new Dreamcast.

If I remember right Microsoft published the first Mass Effect it was only when EA bought Bioware they put it on PS3.

With Bioshock I think Microsoft had a year exclusivity deal.

As well as uncompressed audio, a common reason for the PS3 versions being much better was redundancy; putting the same data at multiple points on the Blu Ray disc to try to counter its slow seek speeds. 

Blu-ray Ray was the difference on some games. And it killed the MS backed HD-DVD monster. And quickly. The fewer tentacles Microsoft has in...anything...the better. People forget about the last great format war. Hosanna in the highest. PS3 was great as it was. Most people who disagree should think about getting a second job. Hosanna in the highest.