This is posted on the Xbox board so that hopefully it won't be seen as flaming any fan of the PS3 fans.  Of course with the way this site works its impossble not to anger such fans, so I am sorry.

I really got to thinking, all you hear sometimes is 360 had a year head start, 360 had a year head start, 360 had a year head start.

Know what else had a year head start over its competition?  The Dreamcast.

We see how that worked out.

Sorry if that was a stupid reason to create a post.  I'm just tired of hearing that the only reason the 360 is successful is because it beat the PS3 to the market.  And despite similar P.R. tactics used by Sony against the Dreamcast "Our system is much more powerfull, so its worth the wait" The 360 still managed a pretty decisive lead at this point in the game.

So the question would be, what made the difference between the Dreamcast and the Xbox 360?  Why did one die horribly despite its large amounts of fanboy love and why did the other system find very good success?

Holy hell that is a lot of gamerscore.

Nah, its not that much.  Some people crush me in terms of GS.

But back to the question, the Dreacast didn't even have massive hardware issues and it had a much bigger fanbase of Sega addicts.  Just seems wierd that the 360 did so well.  Is it because of Live? Halo? What was the magic element that has enabled its success?

MS has lots of moniez. Simplistic, but true and to the point.

Awesome games.

Money...MS has bought their success this whole gen..i think thats objective either

Sega was already hurting from past missteps prior to the Dreamcast.

But Nintendo must have had boatloads of revenue coming off the NES/SNES/Gameboy era. That didn't really catapult the N64 into any kind of lead over the Playstation.

I mean I see what you guys are saying but I'm not sure "spent a lot of money to get good games" is really a bad thing. That's what I want my console publisher to do, secure the top titles I wish to play.

But there seems to be some popularity aspect going on that seems to stem from Halo. I ended up watching TV one night and in three different shows all you saw was that white xbox controller (kind of like all you see in TV shows are Mac computers). In fact, I can't even recall ever seeing a PS3 in popular media outside of their own commercials. When Playstation was king all you saw was that playstation controller in movies, tv, etc. Now there seems to have been a switch in popularity.

I don't really care about how popular any given system is but it does seem to have some effect on potential buyers of a system when all they see represented in media is one certain system over another. I certainly know plenty of people who bought Playstation 2, knowing nothing about games except that it was "cool" to have. Why has the public opinion switched over to microsoft?

Most of the time, those products are there for a reason. They were there as subtle advertising. GM cars being in Transformers wasn't because Michael Bay loves GM.

360 couldn't have had a 1 year head start because next-gen didn't start until Sony said so.