Games are going to be 59.99$.
The hate is hard to understand. There's always hordes of fanboys looking for excitement and to belong in a group that acquire the early system and bash the upcoming, established giant in order to look cool and irreverent and justify their purchase.
It's simply the price of R&D and the importance of consoles in gaming that's continually on the rise. However in prorata, the price ratio of the Dreamcast vs. the PlayStation 2 is the same.
People were excited like crazy too in the Dreamcast day, it's the same thing we're seeing now, only three times bigger and more chaotic since the Internet has far more newbies. I remember reading and posting in Dreamcast threads all day long, and reading tons of fanboys who were sure that Sega would totally stomp Sony. Although Microsoft has endless financial backing, good publisher support and the means to furnish continuous streams of solid software, so far it sounds like another Dreamcast with half the soul Sega had and twice the amount of generic and redundant games, even if the games are going to sell more.
But most folks are waiting for the next PlayStation, just like in the Dreamcast days. I had a launch Dreamcast and simply studied what happened, and the frenzy of the early birds was delusional.
Even if Blu-Ray is a tad slower than a 12x DVD-ROM drive, the caching on HDD helps to counter that. It's infinitely quieter in comparison to the Xbox 360 drive that's as loud and annoying as an hair dryer. How do people enjoy long RPGs with that shit I don't understand.
Just like in the Dreamcast days, people are excited as hell with uber-sleek next-gen graphics, and this time we have HD which impresses even more. This is however just short-sighted, delusional speculation. The Xbox 360 was the first, however in the end I deem that the dust will settle in, and am foreseeing a brutal domination of the PS3 kinda like we saw this gen. At this point, MS hasn't met any of its sales objectives, and the Xbox 360 sells worse than the original Xbox did in the same timeframe, and they lack exclusive killer apps from established franchises.
Lastly, the thing that puzzles me the most is the folks raging against Blu-Ray. It's just an easy target for trolls lacking inspiration IMO. It's good to have lots of space to store game data and high-def video for games. Most of all, finally we're going to head into the HD video era and leave those old SDTV sets behind, it was 'bout friggin' time. I'm very happy that Sony went ahead with the democratisation of HD video, the PS3 will help it and they're just trying to bank on that... so what? Any business would do it if the opportunity was palpable.
It includes more and Sony aims for the long run, a strategy that paid last gen, and IMO will pay just as well this gen too.
