This is my view you can agree or disagree.
Wii is still currently the market leader. Crappier graphics than the others yet its competitive price and interesting controls make it a good seller.
XBOX360 had a few issues when first released, microsoft are looking at 600+ million in repair costs because they rushed their product out early. Think it has to do with overheating caused by inappropriate cooling.
PS3 has had a change in configuration to make it more price competitive in the market as it is still behind the 360 for sales figures. The difference in price between a 60GB drive and a 40GB drive at the retail end is like $40 max so it's bs that they needed to do this to cut $300 off the cost of the unit. Sony usually sells all their Playstations at a loss because they make the cost up in licencing costs, both for the software and the discs cd's DVD+R and blue ray (which is why they are against mod chips because they loose future earnings from disc and game licence sales).
The PS3 is not without its faults. Automatically restarting while playing for 30 minutes etc have been reported. The PS3 was not completely backwards compatible same as the 360, only some games where. The xbox360 also has the issues that the HD-DVD drive is external not internal which was a bad marketing move.
As with any first gen technology you will have issues, and they will continue to fight and drop the price of the consoles. The winner at the end of the day will be the customer.
If the x360 had a bundled HD DVD drive it'd be experiencing the exact same pricing issues that PS3 are experiencing.
The problem with the current HD formats is that no one knew which format was going to win when both consoles were released... We still don't know.
Sony used the PS3 to push the blu-ray, but at a higher cost to the end user. Which has seen them consistently be the slowest seller in each quarter since its release. They can play around with hard drive configurations as much as they want, the blu ray drive will still cost them a fortune to produce for at least the next year or two, keeping a tight grasp on what price they can sell it for.
I'm still yet to meet any "casual" users of technology who care for HD video yet. Both consoles could have waited till the next generation before implementing them. As for capacity for games, blu ray has an advantage for pre-rendered video, in game graphics have very little impact, a dual layer dvd is more than sufficient.
IMO HD DVD was the one thing microsoft got right. It's made them competitive in both the top end market (PS3, Xbox 360) and Low end market (Wii, Xbox 360). Whereas both the PS3 and Wii have pigeon holed themselves as either hardcore or casual machines.
The main mistake microsoft made was the option for a hdd.... It should have been standard, as it can hurt the potential for games on the system in terms of what developers have to work with. Designing games that cannot rely on a hard drive is no easy feat.
