Whoa!! The discussion has taken a different route.

Anyways ... I think things got WAY off topic here ...

A comparison between the Gamecube and PS3 is very valid because the PS3 will (likely) face many of the same problems that plagued the Gamecube; this is an important because depending on how well Sony handles it will determine whether they end up more or less successful than Nintendo was with the Gamecube.

One key problem will be third party relationships ...

Back with the Gamecube it wasn't really until 2003 (about 18 months after the cube was released) that it became obvious that there was a serious problem. At that point few exclusive third party games were being announced, many previous multiplatform games suddenly didn't have a Gamecube version, and regardless of which version sold better or worse third party publishers would blame the Gamecube for poor sales; one instance of this happening was Acclaim blamed the poor sales of Turok Evolution on the Gamecube and announced that they were going to stop producing Gamecube games (this was particularly insulting because it was an awful game and ALL versions of Turok sold poorly).

It was rumored (although never proven) that Microsoft was a major factor in these troubles because there were incentives to make Exclusive XBox games, or simply to prevent the Gamecube from having a port of the game; the theory was that if Microsoft couldn't have the only version of a game they wanted to have the best version of the game by a wide margin and the processing power difference between the Gamecube and XBox was not large enough to ensure that. It doesn't matter whether this rumor is true, the fact that Microsoft was able to use its larger American userbase through strong third party relationships to receive a lot of games the Gamecube didn't get is important.

... Anyways, the thought that the PS3 doesn't need to sell well today because it can sell well down the road is foolish because for every week/month that they're trailing behind the XBox 360 and Wii makes skipping the PS3 version of a game that much more compelling.

There is a difference between the ps3 and game cube, game cube had extremely good first party titles, ps3 does not. Also, the cube came after a n64 user base of 35 million while ps2 user base is almost 120 million.

You guys do know that the same exact thing applies to the xbox 360 right? Seriously it does.

The press and fanboys have been doing everything possible to try to make sony look bad but nobody points out the fact the same thing happend to the xbox 360 as well.

People don't rush in and buy heavily priced systems at launch which is why the wii is selling so much right now.

 yeah but the 360 was sold out and not readily available on shelves the holiday season it came out, the ps3 well...

The difference being that publishers don't care about the xbox 360s performance a year ago, they care about the xbox's performance NOW and more importantly when whatever game they are making gets released. Currently looking at the sales charts Xbox is 6 million units ahead of the PS3 and is in fact pulling further apart. If a publisher looks to be releasing a game in a year they're going to look at the sales and see that the PS3 is doing nothing to close the gap on the Xbox and are much more likely to put their game on the Xbox360.

So the align launches button is meaningless. N64 looked good when you align launches with the PS1 as well, but it's pretty obvious when you show the world how it really was that the N64 never had a chance. 

ShastaMasta. Good points.