I don't buy the "could have saved $100" argument by being able to buy this title for the 360.

It's bunk and everyone knows it.

By this line of reasoning, anyone who bought a 60GB PS3 during the first 7 or so months it was priced at $599 could have saved themselves $200 by not doing anything until the $399 SKU was released. Why would it make a difference? FFXIII wasn't available then and it still isn't available now even with the $399 SKU.

If someone were hypothetically buying a console for one specific game, a reasonably intelligent, sensible individual would likely wait for that one specific game to go retail first. Most likely, buying the game along with the console.

Why would anyone claim to buy a piece of hardware months, if not years before said title were even published?

It's common knowledge that the price of consoles drops in increments throughout their life cycles.

By the time FFXIII is published, there's a high probability one could buy a new PS3 for about $100 less than today at $299.

But people are going to get hurt, upset, offended, whatever anyway because people are emotional and often irrational beings.

From SE's point of view, I don't blame them. There is a large user base for JRPGs on the 360 in English speaking territories. FFXIII has been in production for years and stands to run up a very large development budget by the time the project wraps up.

From Sony's point of view, they've already gone on record as saying they aren't paying for exclusivity this generation. Maybe not 100% true since technically, bundling MGS4 with the 80GB SKU is in effect "paying" for that exclusivity by guaranteeing pack in sales, presumably minus the licensing fee (unconfirmed).

Well myabe because some of those early buyers were big JRPG fans expecting that, just like happened to the PS2, the PS3 would be the place for JRPG's.
As it stands now, you can buy a Wii60 for about the price of a PS3 (in Europe €450 for Wii60, cheapest PS3: €399) and have almost all RPG's for now and in the future.
360: Blue Dragon, Eternal Sonata, Lost Odyssee, Star Ocean 4, Infinite Undiscovery, Tales of Vesperia, Last Remnant and now also the big one: Final Fantasy 13
Wii: Symphonia 2, Oboro Muramasa, King's Story, Fragile, New Tales, Arc Rise Fantasia, FF:CC, Rune Factory

The PS3 and PS platform overall will have sell under its own merits. What a concept.

Someone probably should have brought this up to SCE during the development of the PS3, seeing as how how they seemed to be under the impression that "everyone" (the 100+ million PS2 owners at the time) would buy their $599 console simply because "it's a Playstation!"

Even if it meant "working extra hours," "getting a second job" or robbing someone as they were leaving the store with their PS3.

And I totally agree: a lot of Sony fans are guilty of seeing FFXIII as some sort of magical messiah that would have turned everything around for the PS3 had it remained an exclusive, when the reality is, even rare games that sell in the tens of millions do not sell millions of consoles by themselves.

So now we have some looking to FFXIII Versus, a game that we know next to nothing about, as the next messiah (or KZ2 or LBP, or whatever), when there is no such game that can instantly and permanently change a platform's market share. Not even Halo.

Now that is a very fair assumption.

Of course, the wise individual probably would have waited until all those JRPGs showed up to the party before paying their $399-599 entry fee.

As it stands right now, it seems that one gamer niche category that MS has been courting has been the JRPG niche.

And they've done a very good job, even if the sales of the games themselves have been a bit less than impressive, which may have more to do with the direction the JRPG market has been heading this generation as well as the fact that some of the best JRPGs of this generation are on a platform that has virtually no userbase in the territory where JRPGs originated as a console selling genre.

FF7 was what made the PS1 and FF13 could very well be what unmakes the PS3. I don't see the PS3 dropping off the face of the Earth, but I personally know at least four people who have a PS3 (one was even a Wii fan that bought it for FF13) and are now planning to get rid of it.

of course not

also, Versus is only on PS3...

 If you read my op, you'll see this thread isn't aimed at multi-console owners

There aren't many PS3 owners who aren't multi-plat owners.

 Me too. My hamster wanted to keep his, but threw him out the window of a car.

(P.S. What's your PSN Bod?)

i think its more to do with the price difference of the consoles and that many of the people who have the ps3 would have not have brought it if it was not for this game.

If the ps3 and the 360 were the same price then i think you would have had less ranting about it