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To: slacker711 who wrote (69191)	9/26/2007 3:37:25 AM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Respond to of 213182

Halo 3 is already a smashing success critically and commercially. with all the new and highly acclaimed tools for online play, it should really have legs to keep selling and take Xbox Live to the next level. the online play matters most because people will soon tire of the campaign. also, this is coming on the heels of sleeper hit Bioshock. MSFT has some fantastic exclusives compared to Sony. the other day i sold a bunch of old 360 games i never play anymore. i was amazed at the high prices offered for some year-plus old titles like Saint's Row. this shows MS exclusives have very strong demand and the constant add of new users sustains this. it is like a snowball that keeps getting bigger and rolling over Sony and crushing them. Sony's much hyped, supposed system seller, this year was Lair, which has turned out to be an utter disaster. you are supposed to fly this dragon in battle, which sounds like it'd be cool in 1080p, but Sony forces you to do it by tilting their stupid Sixaxis controller this way and that, which in practice is impossible to do precisely, so people hate this game. Lair is as big a disaster as Halo is a hit. it is interesting the contrast in development. Sony obviously did not rely on actual user feedback or they would have not created such a dud. by contrast, MSFT and Bungie, as profiled in the cover story of last month's Wired, have the world's most sophisticated game testing lab, where they have tweaked Halo endlessly to provide right mix of challenge and reward. it was a pretty cool article if you are into that sort of thing. Having a 10 million unit head start on the competition in this space isnt a bad head start. what that means is that Sony has few if any good exclusives. it has lost some huge ones, including the upcoming Assassin's Creed, and next year's Grand Theft Auto IV, not to mention Silent Hill and many others. there have probably been a dozen major defections that relate directly to MSFT's having huge unit lead (the fabled first-to-10-million) or the rumored incredible difficulty of programming for PS3. Sony still has not had a system seller while MSFT has had ten or so. even the biggest Sony fan has to admit 360 totally blows away PS3 on content. sadly, many people seem to buy PS3 just to get Blu-Ray. this is Pyrrhic victory for Sony. yes, BR wins format wars, but nobody cares. Sony gets to sell another BR unit above cost, but does not recoup this loss through high-margin game sales. at this point, even i would only get PS3 for BR. The content developers dont trust Microsoft anymore than they trust Apple. MSFT seems to be doing much better with developers than Sony is. PS3 supposed to be very hard to program for. dual-release titles tend to look better on 360, or be delayed on PS3. i think Sony was too arrogant due to massive success of PS2. they probably were trying to milk that a few more years and MSFT forced them to release PS3 maybe two-three years ahead of schedule. so PS3 is unmitigated disaster. other big news is Wii. that is the totally separate market of games for people who are not into games. Wii is runaway success. i keep wondering if it will have legs, though, after casual users get tired of the gimmicky controller. bigger Nintendo success story is incredible success of DS franchise. this has gone viral in Japan. all kinds of apps even outside of games (books, home accounting, recipes, English lessons, browser, etc.). i think MSFT was thinking about handheld market and might have tried sneak attack via Zune, but that product is total disaster. instead they should just maintain focus on high-end market and try to bankrupt Sony (bad for consumers because then Xbox will stop evolving, like Windows, but rational strategy for MSFT).