They've comitted brand suicide when they chose short term profit over keeping their brand related 3rd party games as timed exclusives. Most notably GTA, Final Fantasy, Tekken, DMC, and most other Xbox 360 multiplats that are now disassociated from the PS3.

The thing is, Sony obviously doesn't care about brand health, when the interest of their investors is at risk. They've consistantly chosen the short term profit and flatly refused to support most 3rd party games, in order to build Killzone 2, and make sure that they don't show too large of a loss in 1 damn meaningless quarter.

It's short term thinking, and it's what has caused the current disaster and shift of the Sony brand from the top to the bottom of the videogame industry.

*sigh* too much negativity regarding the ps3 lately.

As always ZEN talks the biggest bull crap ever

yes, lol, yes. As usual, you're very astute. However, my point stands.

But folks on this site have said many times that MS killed the XBox to get the 360 out ahead of PS3 so why would Sony not do the same?

Well, I understand MS realised that they'd got themselves locked in on costs (particularly the HDD) with Xbox and wanted to kill it and start again with better cost control.  That also fit with their goal of launching early.

From a quality control point of view they launched too early, and were pretty lucky to get past the whole RROD fiasco.  In truth the 360 should probably have launched around 6 months later than it did to allow for better testing, etc.  However I suspect MS knew full well that their chances of gaining momentum would take a massive knock if they only got a short timeframe lead on Sony and Nintendo so they rushed it through.

I doubt Sony will kill the PS3 because the situation is different, at least in my opinion:

1) PS3 costs are dropping and they don't have the locked in issue MS had

2) PS3 is also about BR, and it would be a bad time to pull PS3 given BR is starting to show serious life with big title sales and they are still waiting for FF 13 and GT to launch

3) Sony I'm sure have realised that in competing with MS for online US MP audience with PSN/Shooters and ignorning pretty much all their core franchises during the consoles early life they've handed Nintendo the general console audience, which is far larger than the audience for 360 (as recent figures show - even with a lower price 360 and a massive jump in sales the Wii easily matched them, showing the demand for Wii is just way higher than 360).

4) Given the difference in specs between PS3 and Wii if Sony chose to focus on a long lifetime (in a funny way I can almost believe their 10 year plan from this perspective) and ignore MS dominance in US online they could still pull back marketshare over time with the PS3 once it gets its price down (assuming Wii hasn't gobbled up the whole market by then)

On the other hand they might dump the PS3 of course - but not for another 2/3 years minimum I would suspect once BR is well established IMHO.

If the PS3 ends next year many people on this site will come to the stark realization that they have no lives anymore because they can't argue about which HD console is better.

Sony invested too much money to just drop the ps3. Its only been out 2 years and its best year for games will be 2009. Next yoe should shed light on how things are going to turn out.

MS was being sued by NVidia over the Xbox's video card. MS had always planned to use the Xbox to enter the video game biz and never planned to make a profit - they need a platform and it was the Xbox. It came out after the PS2, with a higher price tag and got plummeled. What really hurt Xbox sales were the lack of exclusives. Having to wait years to play GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas on the Xbox forced several folks to buy a PS2 just to play GTA and other games.