Osnabrueck

After hearing so many ancedotal stories of PS2 grief, involving fried units and the like, I'm very skeptical about the equity being projected onto the PlayStation brand. However, I'm of the mind that PlayStation has more sway in Europe.

The PlayStation became popular, not just because of clever branding or solid games, but because it was the right system at the right time. This goes all the way back to PlayStation vs Sega Saturn. Sega didn't plan well and delivered a system that was ill-fitted to consumer tastes, and delivered an initial software library that didn't exploit the Saturn's strengths (namely, 2d graphics - a la Capcom games).

My point is that there's nothing terribly special that ties people to the PlayStation. Nintendo used to have an army of killer apps that gave them the midas touch, even when they screwed up. Sony has some of that mojo, but their exclusives are essentially neutralized by the Xbox's exclusives (especially with the Halo franchise).

Look at the two on paper and they virtually blend into one another. They're both feature-laden multimedia hubs that host a jillion controllers, have a jillion buttons, host online play and can push trillions of ray-traced polygons in high def at 60fps. The qualitiative differences between these two is going to be negligible - especially when both are running 2nd generation software.

So all things being equal, and I believe them to be, the winner will be the console that snowballs the biggest user base. At this point, September is an eternity for Sony.

Nintendo is the dark horse here. I'm hoping they'll come out of the box with something so different and interesting that it gets guys like me back into gaming. I just don't see it happening though. Right now the money is in loud, multiplayer, online-capable games where you blow stuff up and/or throw footballs. The PS3 and Xbox will fill that bill, and the Nintendo will languish in 3rd despite having some facinating software.