Just came to my mind..

Sony has won 2 console wars.Nintendo is back now, owning this console war.If there would be only Ps3 and Wii,it would be pretty booooring.

there would be more jrpgs on my PS3 if MS wasn't in the market, so I can't say I'm very fond of them joining - still I'm not bitter enough to ignore, that the 360 is a very fine machine at a nice price and with a lot of quality software

Microsofts crazy money-hatting, xbla and attempts to gain relevance in Japan are the most interestng thing to watch this gen. I laugh everytime they buy a jrpg because I know its going to piss off lots of people.

They wouldn't be in HD yet, and online gaming wouldn't be near the level it is now. So its likely they would actually be on Wii instead, since they would still be readily handle-able on both consoles.

'Course, this is only hypothetical speaking if Sony didn't put the 8 processors in the PS3. But I have a feeling the Xbox pushed them to do that.

Maybe Sega would still be around? I mean they were being assisted by MS before MS decided to go Solo right?

So no, I don't think it'd be boring. Sega > M$ :)

Microsoft have brought in an extra dimension. The money dimension!

Schadenfreude huh? I hope you won't mind, that in my opinion that kind of mindset is despiceable.

@ Shadowblind )

you know, objectively speaking you might be right, that without MS the gaming market hadn't evolved this much, but as a simple human being I don't care about the bigger picture at all, I only care for the satisfaction of my personal gaming needs and my subjective feelings tell me that MS is hindering me in satisfying those

The PS2 had HD games, so i'm pretty sure this gen would of had them too.

Without Microsoft we wouldn't be seeing the amount of AAA games this generation that we have already seen. Sony, brought the PS3 out thinking it would have a 10 year cycle, with 360's success to date, Sony will probably forced to a new console at much the same time Microsoft sends one out.

If by HD games, you mean they output in a 16:9 ratio then I guess you are correct, but I think that is an extremely liberal defintion of HD.  I think the highest resolution the PS2 supported was 480p and that is not considered to be HD, but rather ED (extended definition).  I would be interested to know which (if any) games output in 720p, much less 1080i or 1080p.

To the op, I think that competition between the 3 companies is key to driving innovation in the industry, and while I agree that it sometimes sucks to have to buy 3 different consoles to get all the best games, I think the tradeoff is well worth it.