IMO the PS3 is by far more powerful than the XBox 360, waiting an extra year would have caused the same problem: Developers needing to adjust their existing game engines to make use of the SPUs (the bulk of the system's power).

I think next christmas with more mature system software, free Home service, new games like Rachet and Clank future, Killzone, Lair, etc, new PS3 eye / microphone supporting games and hopefully a small price drop the PS3 will look a lot more attractive to many people.

sharky said: And made it a lot more powerful in that time. Enough to be significantly more powerful than 360. Launching in the year that they did didn't gain them anything. Sales are miserable in that time, so it's not as if you can say well, they held back 360 from gaining even more. Probably Wii did that more than Ps3 if anything. I dont see Sony losing much of anything if they had waited another year on PS3. As it stands they are in big trouble...

If they had half a brain up in management, they would have scratched the BR and installed cheap old DVD drives with a USB BR-Player option for those who want it. That alone would have cut the price about $200 and would have boosted sales considerably. They should have also used common processor technology rather than try to re-invent the processor when they arent even in that line of business. All they did was make a processor that behaves differently but is equivalent overall to things we already have. That would have cut costs even more and they wouldnt have suffered the year of delay.

This generation of consoles was their to lose... and they mucked it up real bad.

@ marc

Although I agree a PS2.5 would have boosted system sales initially, the extra Blu-Ray capacity is very useful for the future as games are becoming more complex, needing more storage for higher resolution graphics and better audio. Many PS2 games are already using up the full storage capacity provided by DVDs, is it strange to think that newer PS3 games production will be handicapped using just DVD technology? Both the PS3 and XBox 360 have more than 10 times the amount of RAM available than is available for PS2 software. IMO DVD is sufficient for a system like the Nintendo Wii though, which is technically often referred to as a GameCube 1.5 (combined with an innovative controller).

Developers actually using the SPUs greatly disagree. Coming from an Amiga background I disagree as well, there's a lot of untapped performance potential inside those SPUs.