I'll ignore the terrible tenses for now, but the point I was trying to make (but I didn't specifically state) is that most games on the PS3 aren't heavily front loaded, sure, you get your ultra huge franchises such as MGS, and GTA, and your yearly titles which are heavily front loaded (which CoD could go on to be), but most of the time, the games are slow-burners, they start off with quite weak sales (surely people remember the Uncharted, Ratchet, and Heavenly Sword doom 'n' gloom threads), but they build up into million sellers in the end, and in the case of Uncharted, multi-million sellers (though scraping).

Resistance is not Sony's Halo. Sure, they were both launch FPSs... but the difference was in the quality. Halo was perceived to be an awesome game from day one, not only that, but Microsoft had no other IPs - Masterchief became Microsoft's Mario. This attracted the FPS fans to the Xbox, and that's why the Xbox got the name of the "FPS console" (Microsoft did a brilliant job removing that stigma from the 360, btw, not even the most rabid of fanboys use that anymore).

The truth is, Sony will never have its own Halo... the fans of the Playstation are fans from many different gaming angles. I, myself, am a platforming/adventure fan, though I do play other games, other Playstation gamers are sports fans, or RPG fans, or beat-'em-up fans. Sony can't have its own Halo, because not enough of its fans are FPS gamers, Sony will never have its own Mario, because there aren't enough platforming fans (sure, Crash got close in the PS1 days).

This is one of the reasons why Sony will struggle this gen to get many 5 million + sellers. The last real hope is GT, but the fanbase for that has been attacked on two fronts - the casual fanbase have moved away from the Playstation to the Xbox and Wii, and some of the more hardcore racing sim fans might have found love with Forza on the Xbox (don't flame or quote me for this, I'm not making a prediction).

I'll pose one question - do you think Sony even have the funds anymore to try and market a new franchise as a Halo-killer... a Halo-killer will need a Halo-killing marketing plan... with Halo-marketing-budget-killing levels of money, can Sony really afford something this risky, especially giving the current state of the economy, and Sony itself, in particular.