^^ Halo3 is just the bigest systemseller this year, Sony may have great games comming but the systemsellers won´t be there till 08 so MS should be able to sell more systems these hollydays, Sony will have a hard time catching up after this, the soonest date for Sony to catch up worldwide is christmas 09 IMO, but if MS plays their price cards right and gets the Falcon out and working it may take even longer, by this time it won´t really matter, they will both have a good userbase and good games, thats what matters for me not who sells five million more or less in the end.

Personaly I like Halo but since I play lots of PC and don´t care for internet gameing to much it doesn´t impress me that much, still its another good reason to get a 360 since the singleplayer is very good.  

" Halo3 is just the bigest systemseller "

==> IT IS NOT lol
the game will sell a lot (4M pre orders), more than any game this year for sure
BUT this will be a low system seller in NA and a NO system seller out of NA.

Why ?

-people who are waiting for Halo3 ALREADY possess a Xbox360.
Halo3 appeals to people that have played Halo1/2, meaning Xbox owners, that already possess Xbox360 !
-Microsoft have to convince people to buy Xbox360, Halo could have helped a lot as Gear of War did last year giving to gamers a strong experiment.
But there is a little problem, Halo3 is not alone, absolutely not alone since, during the same period, UT3/Haze/CoD4/Warhawk/Socom are going to be released. More over, graphicaly (strongest point for gear of War), Halo3 is already out competted by CoD4/UT3 (I dont even mention Gear of War himself...), same for the multiplayer online !
Similarly, imagine a casual gamer in front of a video of Halo3/UT3/GTA4/AS/CoD4,
I m not sure that the more appealing game, only based on visual, will be Halo3
-There are plenty of game that are going to be released like GTA4/Madden that PS2 owners (majority of the casual gamers) are waited a lot more than Halo3 because they played to San Andreas and they dont played to Halo1/2!
-Xbox fan are in extremely low numbers erverywhere but in NA. This means that Halo3 will not sell a lot out of NA. In european country and Japan (that simply didnt buy the previous Xbox), people are not interested in Halo sequel !

Halo can make something with his amaziong sales
but in term of "system seller" it will not be amazing,
it will be just not bad,
and out of NA, it will be near nothing

^^ who gave you all these insights on who has a 360 already and who doesn´t ???

you mention games like UT3/Haze/CoD4/Warhawk/Socom all great games but not in the same class as Halo is with hype, games with the kind hype Halo has will sell systems, if 360 sales don´t go up considerably with Halo3 I´ll be happy to eat a crow, but they will.

Did Halo1 appeal to people who played earlyer Halos ??? No, how could it, it got tonns of new players to play it, who says Halo 3 can´t do this ???

You say UT3 and CoD4 look better than Halo 3, sure they do, but do people really care how great Halo3 looks ??? I don´t think its the look, its the name..... say it with me HALO3, UT3 and CoD4 are not exclusive games, they just don´t build up hype the way and exclusive does and don´t sell systems as much eather.

I don´t have a 360 and I´m not getting one for Halo3, but other people will, Halo3 is a big name with a big hype, hype sells systems and gets people excited, hype gets games shown on TV even outside of gaming shows (we´ve seen the Wii in all sorts of places) no EXCLUSIVE game this year has the hype Halo3 does, not even Galaxy or Brawl,

and don´t feed me the "Halo players already have a 360" BS, do all the FF fans have a PS3 already ??? Do all the Metal Gear Fans have a PS3 already ??? I sure hope not.  

to El Duderino,

- ok, you re right about the hype for UT3 and CoD4
You may have right about Halo3 amazing hype in NA but in europe/japan it is another story.

-about FF/MGS
It is different from Halo3, since we both know that these exclusivity are not totally controled by Sony and in the future FFXIII or MGS4 will maybe become mutiplateform. It is even more true that MGS4 will appear on Xbox360 (but 6-12 monht later).
So people waiting for FF or MGS4 are still waiting to have information about a potential multiplateform release and it will be a critical point if sony is not able to defend his last exclusivity ("no need to buy a PS3 if Xbox360 gets all the game"). It is why MGS4 E3 2007 trailer IN the sony conference was a good point for sony.
At the opposite, for Halo3, everybody know that Halo3 will be release exclusively on Xbox360. So if u want halo, u dont have to wait a critical decision from Microsoft/Sony war : Halo3 is only for xbox360.

^^ nice that we can start agreeing here, yes many people who want Halo3 got a XBox 360 a while ago, FF and MGS4 are still unknown unknowns so people will wait, still I think expecially from now till christmas Halo3 will be a big argument for lots of people in what console to chose, that makes the exclusivity even more important, GTA4 will be a big system seller, but it´s muliplatform, as is CoD4 and many others, a big exclusive like Halo3 will be one of those games that make the 360 the sweeter deal, Sony doesn´t have the exclusive support they had in the PS2 days and they will need to do something about it if they want to gain on the the 360, sure MS doesn´t have have huge third party exclusives eather, but they can be happy to even-out with Sony this generation, for Sony this would be bad,

what really interests me is how both Sony and MS try to tap the "not so core" market with games like Crash Bandicoot and Ratchet and Clank, this may be one of the fields where lots of ground is yet to take for both of them