Perhaps the single biggest product failure, but not the biggest blunder. Nintendo recovered from that mistake quickly whereas what Krazy Ken did with the PS3 Sony may never recover.

I think that's a bit too harsh to call on Sony, it's true that they have taken a major hit with the PS3 due to their own mistakes, but recent trends have shown that Sony can recover and that the PS3 can be a succesful console.

Even if they couldn't recover from this hit, that would already be showing in their 1st party efforts, just like it happened with Sega during it's swan song days of the Dreamcast, which they totally pulled the plug from, in all aspects of the business itself, something that Sony is doing in complete oposition, strenghtening the brand image and product placement of their games.

Only time will tell if Sony can pull through from this generation, I hope that they do, I don't want to see any company leave the market because that will mean less competition and less need for the companies involved to actually pursue new and more varied content with much more value for the consumer. 

i would love too, from what i am seeing the 360 may end up like another IE 6....

A major hit? They are a mere shadow of their former selves. Over the past few years they have gone from >70% market share down to <25%. They can't just come back from this even if they strike it big with every move from here on out for the next 3 years. The PS3 will not and cannot be a successful console because they have lost so much money to get to this point. There isn't really much justification for them to lose that much money either, you can't wave it away by saying that they are establishing themselves in the business when they were already the most established.

I don't want Sony to leave the business, but if they did then it wouldn't be of great loss to the consumer as console makers usually find themselves irrelevant before the end anyway.

I'm not waving away anything :P But wasn't it the same for Nintendo from the past two generations? True that they have been profitable still in these generations, but they also went from being the dominant force, by large, on the 8-bit and 16-bit era, to being overwhelmed by Sony.

Who's to say that Sony can't do the same for the next generation? As long as they're around, anything can happen, as much as we speculate and think that this or that can happen, we'll just have to wait and see ;)

Also, I don't agree with your last statement, no console maker is irrelevant to the market before the end. Sega wasn't, Atari wasn't and sure as Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo aren't as well. All console makers are relevant in diferent parameters and different scenarios, that's why they still exist and why even console makers who left the business are still in the minds of the people who supported them in the past. 

That is just another way of saying Nintendo did very little on the hardware side so they could sell a souped up GameCube for $150 more than a GameCube (Maybe more. I know the GameCube was at most $99 when the Wii launched).  As for making money on software.  All Nintendo was set the bar on how to use software and accessories to sell overpriced hardware.

Even if you're generous and only count the from 3 years after the PS1 was released so from that peak to just before the end of 2006 Nintendo has either dominated or held their own against Sony in terms of hardware sales, profit and software sales. They have both a handheld and a TV based console line, remember? They have never been overwhelmed by Sony at any point in recent history. At worst you could say that between 2004 and 2005 Sony held the upper hand.

Sony doesn't have the 6 Billion dollar man called Miyamoto in their stable of developers. It would be harder for them to pull off the same thing as they simply don't have that man to call their own. He launched Pokemon and Mario and many others.

The impact of the console manufacturer who is performing the worst leaving the market is very small compared to say Nintendo deciding that from tomorrow they will just be a software manufacturer for example. Only the loyalists would shed a tear for a poor performing manufacturer leaving the market, the rest have already moved on.

@ thx1139: The Wii was meant to cost $199 but they increased the price and offered Wii-Sports as compensation after they found out exactly how much Sony were charging for their console. Oh an no hardware is overpriced which sells as well as the Wii. Arguably it was underpriced at launch compared to the PS3 and Xbox 360 given their massive shortages over the years. You can blame Sony for that one as well.

I hope not.Competition is what makes each company put effort and thought into their games and hardware

But no one is denying that Nintendo has always had the biggest impact on the video game market, hell they praticaly created it from scratch after the Video Game crash in 1983, and they'll be around for a long time with much more profit and much more knowledge on how the market shifts and moves along the years. 

The people who cannot see this, must really take a history lesson of what Nintendo means to the video game market.

But I also don't count out Sony, Microsoft or any other competitors that might appear on the future, because, just as Nintendo made their way into being the biggest video game company in the world, so can any other company do the same with time.

When I posted that comparison, I was strictly talking about the console market, because we all know that Nintendo has always dominated the handheld market. The only other competitor that has managed to take a slight bit of their market share from handhelds has been Sony with the PSP, but I see that Apple with the concept of the iPhone can also bring something new to that market, even though I think that Nintendo will be a step ahead of anyone who tries to enter that market.

Also, I'm not against your points of view, I share most of them, but I also think that many things can still change, as the future of the video game market is not set on stone (this generation has been a prime example of it, many people never thought that Nintendo could pull off such a reaction for the Wii and DS, yet those same people were proven wrong), so counting out Sony, even with their blunders, I think it's a bit premature to do.

I think it depends on the sales trend. If it goes on like now, with the PS3 / 360 gap decreasing by 200k a week, it could spell a quick return to the last place for MS. At 200k a week, the gap would be down to zero then favorable to PS3 in only 6 months (5 million gap).

I doubt the MS shareholders would allow another last place in video games after the Xbox 1 fiasco which lost billions. Gaming was never one of MS main businesses to begin with...

So IF Natal doesn't succeed and PS3 increases its domination in weekly sales, I think there's definitely a good chance that MS gives up on gaming. Remember the 360 is really successful in only one country in the world, the US (two actually, with the UK being the other for cultural reasons), partly for nationalistic reasons. In every other country, PS3 already has a bigger installed base while being more expensive and despite being released one year later. Hardly a success on a worldwide scale.

On the other hand, if Natal succeeds or MS somehow manages to avoid being last again (which I highly doubt according to current sales trend), then they won't give up on gaming and will take part in another console gen.

I personnally hope they won't leave as competition is good. I don't hope they succeed too much either, since I don't like their business model where you pay for everything including free things like peer 2 peer online gaming, where ads are everywhere and the hardware is unreliable... Worst than everything, they tend to close more studios than they open, and use their money to buy timed exclusives instead of helping game development like Sony does. We need more MS 1st party studios quickly.