The PS2 sold at a loss of $50-$100 a unit, had a powerful launch, sold like mad and was a commercial success yet it took more than two years before its price dropped even $100.

The PS3 on the otherhand sells at a loss of $200-$250 a unit, had a poor launch, is selling relatively poorly and is a commercial nightmare that has resulted in a 2 billion dollar loss. Do you really think the PS3 will be dropping in price anytime sooner than the PS2 did? Do you honestly think Sony can afford to lower its price?

The PS3 is already price cut in Japan. It sells at a discount when compared to the rest of the world and it's done NOTHING for sales.

The total price of a system seller largely influences how high quality the game has to be inorder to sell systems. Consider the following prices and think how good a game would have to be to sell these systems:

• $100 system + $40 game
• $200 system + $50 game
• $300 system + $50 game
• $400 system + $60 game
• $500 system + $60 game
• $600 system + $60 game

At the lower end of the spectrum you're seeing the situation which was common for the GBA through most of its life, the next two represent the common strategy of the PS2, Gamecube, XBox, Wii and most other successful platforms. After you move beyond that you're dealing with the strategy of the PS3 and XBox 360.

A system seller (in my opinion) is a game which convinces someone who wouldn't initially buy the system to buy it; how good does a game have to be to convince someone (who is resistant to buying the system) to pay $500-$700 to play it?

That's because Square-Enix pressured them to lower the price or they wouldn't develop for them.

Hmm, I've never heard that before. Do you have a source for that? I know Ubisoft was lobbying for a price cut, but I didn't hear SE force it on Sony.

There is no floor to PS3 weekly sales. By which I mean, sales increases will merely be seasonal, while otherwise sales will continually fall. Right now they still have hype, they still have fans waiting for games and for price drops, putting faith in the PlayStation name. This Xmas and next Xmas will not be typified by these fans finally buying PS3's, it will be typified by millions upon millions of fans finally giving up on PS3 and buying the competing systems, because PS3 will still have the highest price and worst mass-appeal lineup. Sure, sales may be a little bit better next year, as a price cut and some marquee games finally come, but even if a $100 price cut and an incrementally improved lineup doubled sales, that increase merely gets PS3 to a point where it will sell maybe 8 million consoles a year worldwide. Considering what Wii is doing right now, and the size of the lead it will have by next year, that would be horribly inadequete. I've already predicted that PS3 sales will fall below 60K/month for NPD US. Now let me add to that: PS3 sales will fall below 6K/week in Japan.

I was not rude, I merely stated a personal opinion.

Unfortunately no, I read it along time ago and damned if I could find the source again. Any attempt to search for the article has only brought up articles about Square discussing their cautious approach to developing for the PS3.

I think it has found its leveling out at about 8k for Japan. When was the last game released in Japan for the PS3? And, from Famitsu's Japan numbers, it looks like the PS3 might have gone up instead of down.

Also, if you have faith in VGCharts weekly numbers, it looks like the PS3 is already tracking about 57k for the past 3 weeks or so. I think this week will be the last week for NPD, so it should pull at least another 15k, which would give it somewhere in the vicinity of 70K systems for May NPD.

You're mixing up two different things, one of which is not what we were talking about before. One thing is duplicating data on the game disc due to the low speed of the optical drive, another one is using the console's hard drive for caching. It appears that the former was done on the PS3 only, while the latter was done on both the PS3 and the 360.

Data caching on the PS3 for Oblivion:

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=73385