Why the PS3 Will Lose This Christmas

Once again, video gamers are treated to one of our favorite things: the console war. There will be hundreds of thousands of preorders, game sales, hype, and for those of us like myself, camping outside the local Best Buy waiting for the stroke of midnight to get our choice of game system. Perhaps this is a moot point as all the preorders have been sold for both Sony's Playstation 3 and Nintendo's Wii. But if I may be so bold, I think that Sony will lose this generation's console battle.

The question I always ask myself when a new game system is launched is "What does this system offer me for the price?" There's the usual talk here of bits and bytes and graphic mapping and so on, but how many people really understand what that really means? Most of the time, its parents buying the systems or games for kids and half the time, they don't even know what the name of the system is. The usual scene is a parent comes into a video game store looking like a freshly baited fish walking up to me and saying "My son wants me to get that new... what is it? Um... Oh I don't know that new game system everyone is talking about." After that I need to alert the medical team when I tell her the price leaving the poor lady from having to go through the shock of realizing she's not getting one this Christmas.

That aside, what does the Playstation 3 have to offer for its $699 asking price? Not enough. First there is the Blu-Ray DVD technology included. Oh good, I can now use my PS 3 as a DVD player for all the HD-DVD disks I've been stockpiling since I first heard about Blu-Ray technology. And at $30 a DVD believe me, I have thousands. What, aren't you independently wealthy too? Ha ha ha silly mortals. I guess for those of you who absolutely need to have HD-DVD right now the PS3 is a good idea. But for the rest of us who don't have enough money to buy sports cars, word on the street is one of the Japanese companies has developed technology for a HD-DVD/DVD player hybrid that should be mass marketed sometime next year.