You Thought Wrong: Why The PS3 Won’t Lose Out In The Next-Gen Console Wars

All of the recent discussions in forums, blogs, analysts’ reactions seems to indicate that the PS3 could lose out on the next-generation console wars. But I beg so to differ.

The main dispute seems to be with the $600 price tag (although there is a cheaper version for $500). I mean no one’s ever going to spend that much money on a console, right? Why bother 600 bucks for a PS3 when there are cheaper alternatives like the X360 or the Nintendo Wii for that matter? So you’d be thinking that no one is going to bother about it in Bangladesh, right? Well you thought WRONG!

If everyone wanted the cheapest of everything, then we wouldn’t had Mercedes or BMW’s rolling down the streets of Dhaka, or first-class flights, or the A380, or those ridiculously expensive home theatre systems for that matter! Now ask yourself. Did that price tag on the expensive T-Shirt hold you back on purchasing it? The Nintendo Gamecube is a whole lot cheaper than the PS2, but did you buy it? I don’t think so.

And besides, the extra price is for the Blu-Ray Disc reader that you’d be getting. For the X360, you have to spend around 200-300 dollars for the optional HD-DVD reader. And the launching price of anything is unreasonably high. The only ones who is going to get the console with its launching price are those who are plain stupid (and with tons of money). As time goes on, the price is surely to drop, I mean its basic Economics! Case in point: The PS2 cost around $500 as it was released in the US in 1999. But look now, you can get it for less than 200 bucks! So I am definitely sure that the price will go down.

The next seems to be about the Blu-Ray discs. It has “that” state of the art copyprotection technologies that everyone is fearing, so that pirates have a hard time cracking it. Well, it is going to take some time for pirated discs to appear. But nobody said it is not going to! And did you ever think once about what the No.1 piracy hater Microsoft is going to put in their HD-DVD discs?

The PC games that come with SecureRom, StarForce, etc. employ the toughest copy protection technologies (to date), but did that stop pirated discs from appearing? No! You can play those games just as well. And stop moaning if no-one can’t pirate your favourite PS3 game – it will save the game publishers billions of dollars in lost revenue and you can finally play it over the internet.

So in the end, Sony might win again in the console wars. My predictions are that Sony will claim the first spot, with Microsoft at second and Nintendo at third (as usual). I am no analyst here, it’s just my opinion from the years of experience I had with games and technology. But then again, this is a dog-eat-dog business, so we might even see Nintendo in the 1st spot. Yeah right, that’ll happen. When cars fly.