Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered

For those not currently in the know, the gaming industry has been upended of late with the arrival of the next-gen consoles (which technically are now current-gen console but there we go) and the ensuing war over sales. The XBox 360 hit the market first which gave it something of an advantage, especially following the success of the 1st generation of XBox. It’s still up there in the race but the Nintendo Wii managed to come out of nowhere to take a large chunk out of Microsoft’s sales figures…nobody was expecting a Nintendo machine to appeal to anyone but Nintendo fans, however the truly unique control system (which turned out to be a hit with all games and not just the built-in games designed specifically to show it off) and the fact that Nintendo are still releasing some really fun and pleasant games made it quite appealing to gamers.

Finally we all know Sony’s tale, they arrived very late in the game with a console that isn’t as backward compatible for UK users as it is for everyone else and with sale prices so high you need to mortgage your house/sell a few kids/knock off your parents for the inheritance to be in with a chance of affording one. Frankly for the price of a Playstation 3 you could easily build a brand new top of the line computer and then have both computer and games machine all in one.

Now the consoles are on the market and have taken their places in the sales charts, we’ve hit the Summer lull (It’s Summer, everyone’s outside unless you’re British and avoiding the storms, so nobody’s buying consoles or games.) It seems that Microsoft have been scheming to take back their top spot and they may just manage it if some of the (many many) rumours on the Internet are true. With the XBox’s answer to the Playstation 3 coming at the beginning of Autumn (the Elite is packed with bigger hard drive, better processor and new support for HDMI) with a much lower price-tag than the PS3, there are now rumours that Microsoft will combine the release with a price-cut across the board for all makes of XBox 360 possibly in an attempt to make the console more affordable than Nintendo’s Wii (currently the cheapest console out there.) Combine this with hype about a new processor chip being developed and Microsoft have already managed to appeal to every gamer out there.

I’ve no doubt a price cut of any extent, let alone a major one would really drive the nail well and truly into the Playsation 3 coffin and make Nintendo at least break a tiny sweat, though the latter is quite unlikely as Nintendo really are a dominating force, especially in Japan.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 at 6:45 pm and is filed under Gadgety Goodness, Playstation 3, XBox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.