The fact is the Xbox is still the better gaming device - and that's what its point is. I bought a PS3. For Bluray movies only. I haven't bought a single game for it and never plan to. Its my top-of-the-line Bluray player. The 360 is the better game system. So its not what will happen to the 360 - its what will happen to the 360 HDDVD player. It will die.
Thank you for stating what is obvious to gamers yet seems to be obtuse to those who aren't. [breathes a sigh of relief]
Geez people why do you think the HD DVD drive was an add-on? An add-on Blu-Ray drive can just as easily be made. Either way it has nothing to do with gaming.
But please don't try to tell people that the PS3 didn't sell as well as it should have because of BD, the format, as you are implying! ...Price, yes. Format, no.
Actually wasn't the price higher because of the BD format? So it can still be said that BD was the reason it didn't sell well.
Quote:
Now that the price has dropped to just $50 more than the 360, sales have jumped, and are actually higher than the 360. It's a far better value.
As a Blu Ray player, yes. As a gaming machine, almost but not quite.
The better selection of games and XBox Live still makes the XBox 360 a better gaming console for any serious gamer. Many people own both, but those that pick one in the console gaming community still prefer an Xbox 360.
...Which doesn't bode well for the XBox 360, which is already suffering badly. With a drive that will essentially be useless soon for movies, it just lost its main competitive edge over the Wii, and it no longer compares in features to the PS3.
Quote:
Originally Posted by petermac
What now becomes of M$ Xbox 360? Do they release a Xbox 180, do the U turn and make a Xbox with BluRay. Xbox's die so fast there will be market space for a replacement. Also, does this news also make the Playstation the media/gaming centre of choice. I heard of some nice integration work being done with Xbox and AppleTV. Now, I believe Apple is in a position to bundle a BluRay player into Apple TV and allow me to lose one box from under my Sharp Aquos.
I have to assume that there is some corruption in your system that's doing this to you. Your problems are much more than most people seem to be having.
I suggest using a classic OS X troubleshooting technique. Create a new user account and try Safari under that. If it works well, it's not the browser, but something wrong in your original user account.
Give me a break. The consumers didn't decide anything. Besides the Blue Ray player that was included with the Sony PS3, hardly any stand alone players were even sold. Fact is, far more HD players were sold as stand alone units then Blue Ray players. Do a Google search, the margin was something like 4 HD players for every 1 Blue Ray player. Granted, the PS3 made the numbers seem lopsided in the other direction. Strange really, as hardly anybody I know has used the DVD player build in the PS2 as their DVD player. People buy games systems to play games, not watch video. Including the Blue Ray players in Sony PS3s to determine total amount of players sold is kindof like including cell phones in the sale of MP3 players to suggest Nokia is really the most successful maker of music players. If anything, the Blue Ray player is just a mere afterthought in a consumer's decison to buy the PS3.
Moreover, even with the PS3 sales included, the number of Blueray players in the wild is peanuts compared to standard DVD players. Certainly, not enough to decide the victor considering the sales of HD content is almost relatively non existent compared to typical DVD sales (again do a Google search).
Make no mistake, studios and retailors decided the victor. Consumers will inadvertently support whatever format is hand feed to them because they eventually will not have a choice. Most consumers are to ignorant to know the difference. Here big studios were paid big dollars to support a particular format. Do a Google search, recently both Fox and Warner were paid hundreds of millions of dollars to go with Blue Ray. Consumers are not going to buy into a format that doesn't have any content.
Which brings us to my next point. Retailors wanted a winner selected because it cost more money to support multiple formats. They had to buy movies for both formats, stock players for both, and divide advertising costs. Companies like Best Buy, Walmart, Blockbuster, and Netflix could care less what consumers were selecting, as the sales were almost non existent. They merely wanted a winner. They picked the camp with the most studio support. Afterall, they are in the business of selling content.
Blue Ray might have benefits. However, HD for consumers was the more open format. Like everything Sony does, DRM was the primary thought behind Blueray.
Probably the only thing in your diatribe that has any validity.
Which brings us to my next point. Retailors wanted a winner selected because it cost more money to support multiple formats. They had to buy movies for both formats, stock players for both, and divide advertising costs. Companies like Best Buy, Walmart, Blockbuster, and Netflix could care less what consumers were selecting, as the sales were almost non existent. They merely wanted a winner. They picked the camp with the most studio support. Afterall, they are in the business of selling content.
If the news reports were to be believed, that's not what happened. When studios and retailers made their announcements that they were dropping hddvd, the reason they usually gave was that bluray disks outsold hddvd disks over the holidays by a huge margin (I believe I read 10 to 1).
Once studios and retailers dump a format, it finishes off the war. But consumers had a choice, and during the time that both were widely available (and hddvd players on sale for dirt cheap) consumers still chose bluray in a big way. And I'll bet ps3 had at least a minor hand in it.
If the news reports were to be believed, that's not what happened. When studios and retailers made their announcements that they were dropping hddvd, the reason they usually gave was that bluray disks outsold hddvd disks over the holidays by a huge margin (I believe I read 10 to 1).
Once studios and retailers dump a format, it finishes off the war. But consumers had a choice, and during the time that both were widely available (and hddvd players on sale for dirt cheap) consumers still chose bluray in a big way. And I'll bet ps3 had at least a minor hand in it.
And that was a good marketing strategy by Sony in the Blu Ray/HD-DVD war. That was strategical part of the competition war between the 2 formats.
Just? Old news. Toshiba's news conference was at 5 p.m. Tokyo time, 3 a.m. Eastern time. I posted about that early this morning. Do try to keep up.
So now we are slamming people for posting news that is 9 hours old? AI didn't post an article on it and I had not read that so I'm quite glad minderbinder posted the link.
Nope, it's not an isolated problem. Webkit has serious issues with memory leaks and overhead and it's about time that Apple started to do something about it. It happens on both my machine and my GF's.
Do use use Safari or any other webkit-based browser? How long has it been running? Check out the "real memory" column of Activity Monitor to see how much memory it's using.
I know about the memory leaks. But I often keep Safari running for days without any problems.
I was previously having problems with Safari crashing, but that went away with the second Flash update, and 10.5.1. I've nary a crash since then, and speeds seem to be alright.
As usual, some people have problems when othgers don't. That tells us that the problem is varied, and can't be relegated to one item. There must be more to it than that.
Remember that whenever Apple issues an upgrade, or even an update, some people have lots of issues, and others have none, or almost none. It isn't any one thing, but the interrelationship between several things that cause the problems. I believe the same thing to be true here as well.
You misunderstand. That's exactly what the article says the ISPs don't want. They're claiming their networks are stressed, even with a relatively small number of heavy users today. Imagine if everybody did it. If you want to be able to download hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes of data a month, they're going to make you pay for that. No local storage would be their worst nightmare. They'd have to keep transferring the same large movie files over and over again if you want to watch it more than once. They're not testing bandwidth caps, tiered pricing and packet shaping for no reason. Read the article, don't just skim it. Note where it says:
And that's at today's speeds.
Yes, I know. I just don't agree. Articles I've read in Science and otherwhere, where researchers are working on this, are saying that things will be changing in major ways. The people in this article are just concerned with the here and now, and are trying to keep the money in the corporate pocketbook.
But, that too will pass. remember all of the overbuilding that went on in the backbone industry just a scant few years ago? Remember how people were saying that they built way too much capacity? Remember how much of that capacity lay unused as "dark fiber"?
I'm not impressed at the isp's whining. They always whine. This increase in consumer speed will pace the build-up of the backbone which is continuall happening. Much of that "dark fiber" is being reclaimed, and will be put into use. More is being discussed.
Cisco just came out with routers that switch vastly more connections at much higher speeds than before, for this very eventuality.
By the time we see 150Mb/s in a good number of homes, the isp's will have far more bandwidth to allocate, as will individual sites. The same thing will be true when 1Gb/s comes out. Not to worry.
I heard the same complaints when broadband first came out, and the average site was running 1 to 3 1.54Mb/s lines, and the backbone was just 1Gb/s.
We're far past that now, with many sites having several Gb/s capacity, and the backbone is running at several Terab/s.
There will always be times when home capacity outstrips the isp for a short while, but then it catches up. Let them bitch. Those who refuse to upgrade will fail, which is as it should be.
Actually wasn't the price higher because of the BD format? So it can still be said that BD was the reason it didn't sell well.
If you carefully read my post you would see what I wrote about that.
But, you're putting it backwards, saying that the format itself was to blame, when it wasn't, it was just the price, which was also a result of the expensive Cell inside.
Both have been dropping in price rapidly.
Try to understand that the DVD players in both the 360 and Wii cost the manufacturers about $5. That price won't drop anymore. No advantage there. The cpu for the Wii is cheap as well, just an upgraded PPC from the Cube.
The 360's 3 core PPC is more expensive, but less than the Cell, and the R&D costs were much less as well.
What this all means is that the PS3 price can continue to drop much more than the rivals, while making a profit.
In addition, given the time they've had to work on it, gaming companies have said that the tools provided have finally matured. They were pretty rough at launch, and that contributed to the game delays later on. but this is behind them, and more games are arriving.
We can see that the PS3 is outselling the 360, and both reasons account for that. As a game machine, and as a player.
Quote:
As a Blu Ray player, yes. As a gaming machine, almost but not quite.
The better selection of games and XBox Live still makes the XBox 360 a better gaming console for any serious gamer. Many people own both, but those that pick one in the console gaming community still prefer an Xbox 360.
I've found it to be very interesting that for the past year, the anti-PS3 and Sony camp has alternately said that while the PS3 was a better player, it was an inferior game machine, then, despite it being a better game machine, it was an inferior player.
I've also read ad nausium that it sold because it was a player, but not as a console, and that it sold because it was a console, but not as a player.
I do wish people would make up their minds!
We will see, over the next year, that games for the PS3 will be out in numbers, and that as game companies get more used to the machines, the graphics and gameplay will be better than that of the 360, if even just by a little, at first.
As a player, I also find it interesting that home theater designers, and installers, according to the home theater magazines, much prefer BD, and in the form of the PS3.
I'm buying one as soon as the new player becomes available, so that I can decide which one to get. Meanwhile my friends have brought theirs over to try out. Games, even though they are first generation, still look spectacular.
MS possibly made a fatal decision in not including HD-DVD as a built-in. They could have sucked up the extra losses. Hell, they lost $1.2 billion for the first five years on their games division since the first XBox came out, EVERY YEAR.
Also, the well publicized failures of the 360's is well known. The fix MS has supposedly incorporated has been doubted to actually fix the problem. This is costing MS a whopping $1.3 billion in announced losses just to take care of warrantee costs for that problem alone. Estimates is that it may be too low, as it assumes a 16.5% failure rate, where estimates of that failure rate are that it is at least 30%, and that eventually may include ALL 360' s out there.
Meanwhile, the PS3 is acknowledged to be rock stable.
Probably the only thing in your diatribe that has any validity.
The only thing that was more open was the lack of region codes. But, Bd has fewer than DVD currently has, and are not being used to this date. Even so, almost no one cares about that anyway.
MS possibly made a fatal decision in not including HD-DVD as a built-in. They could have sucked up the extra losses. Hell, they lost $1.2 billion for the first five years on their games division since the first XBox came out, EVERY YEAR.
Also, the well publicized failures of the 360's is well known. The fix MS has supposedly incorporated has been doubted to actually fix the problem. This is costing MS a whopping $1.3 billion in announced losses just to take care of warrantee costs for that problem alone. Estimates is that it may be too low, as it assumes a 16.5% failure rate, where estimates of that failure rate are that it is at least 30%, and that eventually may include ALL 360' s out there.
Meanwhile, the PS3 is acknowledged to be rock stable.
Yeah, I agree. I think the balance of power in the 360 vs PS3 race just shifted. The end of the format war will definitely help out the PS3, though MS fanbois will be loath to admit it.
Microsoft, meanwhile, will scramble to get a Blu-ray add-on for the 360 out, and/or drop 360 pricing further. On the PS3 side, the console is finally due to get some really good games, and developers are finally starting figuring out how to program efficiently for it, meaning that the PS3's higher limits should start coming into play. I'd expect worldwide PS3 sales for 2008 to outpace the 360, though I'm sure MS will put up a heckuva fight.
Though, can anything knock off the Wii? It's so very well-positioned with that low price during a time of economic uncertainty. And mainstream gamers just flat-out love it.
Comments
The fact is the Xbox is still the better gaming device - and that's what its point is. I bought a PS3. For Bluray movies only. I haven't bought a single game for it and never plan to. Its my top-of-the-line Bluray player. The 360 is the better game system. So its not what will happen to the 360 - its what will happen to the 360 HDDVD player. It will die.
Thank you for stating what is obvious to gamers yet seems to be obtuse to those who aren't. [breathes a sigh of relief]
Geez people why do you think the HD DVD drive was an add-on? An add-on Blu-Ray drive can just as easily be made. Either way it has nothing to do with gaming.
But please don't try to tell people that the PS3 didn't sell as well as it should have because of BD, the format, as you are implying! ...Price, yes. Format, no.
Actually wasn't the price higher because of the BD format? So it can still be said that BD was the reason it didn't sell well.
Now that the price has dropped to just $50 more than the 360, sales have jumped, and are actually higher than the 360. It's a far better value.
As a Blu Ray player, yes. As a gaming machine, almost but not quite.
The better selection of games and XBox Live still makes the XBox 360 a better gaming console for any serious gamer. Many people own both, but those that pick one in the console gaming community still prefer an Xbox 360.
...Which doesn't bode well for the XBox 360, which is already suffering badly. With a drive that will essentially be useless soon for movies, it just lost its main competitive edge over the Wii, and it no longer compares in features to the PS3.
What now becomes of M$ Xbox 360? Do they release a Xbox 180, do the U turn and make a Xbox with BluRay. Xbox's die so fast there will be market space for a replacement. Also, does this news also make the Playstation the media/gaming centre of choice. I heard of some nice integration work being done with Xbox and AppleTV. Now, I believe Apple is in a position to bundle a BluRay player into Apple TV and allow me to lose one box from under my Sharp Aquos.
I have to assume that there is some corruption in your system that's doing this to you. Your problems are much more than most people seem to be having.
I suggest using a classic OS X troubleshooting technique. Create a new user account and try Safari under that. If it works well, it's not the browser, but something wrong in your original user account.
Give me a break. The consumers didn't decide anything. Besides the Blue Ray player that was included with the Sony PS3, hardly any stand alone players were even sold. Fact is, far more HD players were sold as stand alone units then Blue Ray players. Do a Google search, the margin was something like 4 HD players for every 1 Blue Ray player. Granted, the PS3 made the numbers seem lopsided in the other direction. Strange really, as hardly anybody I know has used the DVD player build in the PS2 as their DVD player. People buy games systems to play games, not watch video. Including the Blue Ray players in Sony PS3s to determine total amount of players sold is kindof like including cell phones in the sale of MP3 players to suggest Nokia is really the most successful maker of music players. If anything, the Blue Ray player is just a mere afterthought in a consumer's decison to buy the PS3.
Moreover, even with the PS3 sales included, the number of Blueray players in the wild is peanuts compared to standard DVD players. Certainly, not enough to decide the victor considering the sales of HD content is almost relatively non existent compared to typical DVD sales (again do a Google search).
Make no mistake, studios and retailors decided the victor. Consumers will inadvertently support whatever format is hand feed to them because they eventually will not have a choice. Most consumers are to ignorant to know the difference. Here big studios were paid big dollars to support a particular format. Do a Google search, recently both Fox and Warner were paid hundreds of millions of dollars to go with Blue Ray. Consumers are not going to buy into a format that doesn't have any content.
Which brings us to my next point. Retailors wanted a winner selected because it cost more money to support multiple formats. They had to buy movies for both formats, stock players for both, and divide advertising costs. Companies like Best Buy, Walmart, Blockbuster, and Netflix could care less what consumers were selecting, as the sales were almost non existent. They merely wanted a winner. They picked the camp with the most studio support. Afterall, they are in the business of selling content.
Blue Ray might have benefits. However, HD for consumers was the more open format. Like everything Sony does, DRM was the primary thought behind Blueray.
Probably the only thing in your diatribe that has any validity.
Which brings us to my next point. Retailors wanted a winner selected because it cost more money to support multiple formats. They had to buy movies for both formats, stock players for both, and divide advertising costs. Companies like Best Buy, Walmart, Blockbuster, and Netflix could care less what consumers were selecting, as the sales were almost non existent. They merely wanted a winner. They picked the camp with the most studio support. Afterall, they are in the business of selling content.
If the news reports were to be believed, that's not what happened. When studios and retailers made their announcements that they were dropping hddvd, the reason they usually gave was that bluray disks outsold hddvd disks over the holidays by a huge margin (I believe I read 10 to 1).
Once studios and retailers dump a format, it finishes off the war. But consumers had a choice, and during the time that both were widely available (and hddvd players on sale for dirt cheap) consumers still chose bluray in a big way. And I'll bet ps3 had at least a minor hand in it.
If the news reports were to be believed, that's not what happened. When studios and retailers made their announcements that they were dropping hddvd, the reason they usually gave was that bluray disks outsold hddvd disks over the holidays by a huge margin (I believe I read 10 to 1).
Once studios and retailers dump a format, it finishes off the war. But consumers had a choice, and during the time that both were widely available (and hddvd players on sale for dirt cheap) consumers still chose bluray in a big way. And I'll bet ps3 had at least a minor hand in it.
And that was a good marketing strategy by Sony in the Blu Ray/HD-DVD war. That was strategical part of the competition war between the 2 formats.
Toshiba just announced they are stopping manufacturing of HDDVD.
http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2008_02/pr1903.htm
It's over.
Toshiba just announced they are stopping manufacturing of HDDVD.
http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2008_02/pr1903.htm
Nice find. I wonder if the HD-DVD campers can admit that it an obsolete format now?
It's over.
Toshiba just announced they are stopping manufacturing of HDDVD.
Just? Old news. Toshiba's news conference was at 5 p.m. Tokyo time, 3 a.m. Eastern time. I posted about that early this morning. Do try to keep up.
My sources inform me that *you* invented Pong.
I wish!
Just? Old news. Toshiba's news conference was at 5 p.m. Tokyo time, 3 a.m. Eastern time. I posted about that early this morning. Do try to keep up.
So now we are slamming people for posting news that is 9 hours old? AI didn't post an article on it and I had not read that so I'm quite glad minderbinder posted the link.
Nope, it's not an isolated problem. Webkit has serious issues with memory leaks and overhead and it's about time that Apple started to do something about it. It happens on both my machine and my GF's.
Do use use Safari or any other webkit-based browser? How long has it been running? Check out the "real memory" column of Activity Monitor to see how much memory it's using.
I know about the memory leaks. But I often keep Safari running for days without any problems.
I was previously having problems with Safari crashing, but that went away with the second Flash update, and 10.5.1. I've nary a crash since then, and speeds seem to be alright.
As usual, some people have problems when othgers don't. That tells us that the problem is varied, and can't be relegated to one item. There must be more to it than that.
Remember that whenever Apple issues an upgrade, or even an update, some people have lots of issues, and others have none, or almost none. It isn't any one thing, but the interrelationship between several things that cause the problems. I believe the same thing to be true here as well.
You misunderstand. That's exactly what the article says the ISPs don't want. They're claiming their networks are stressed, even with a relatively small number of heavy users today. Imagine if everybody did it. If you want to be able to download hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes of data a month, they're going to make you pay for that. No local storage would be their worst nightmare. They'd have to keep transferring the same large movie files over and over again if you want to watch it more than once. They're not testing bandwidth caps, tiered pricing and packet shaping for no reason. Read the article, don't just skim it. Note where it says:
And that's at today's speeds.
Yes, I know. I just don't agree. Articles I've read in Science and otherwhere, where researchers are working on this, are saying that things will be changing in major ways. The people in this article are just concerned with the here and now, and are trying to keep the money in the corporate pocketbook.
But, that too will pass. remember all of the overbuilding that went on in the backbone industry just a scant few years ago? Remember how people were saying that they built way too much capacity? Remember how much of that capacity lay unused as "dark fiber"?
I'm not impressed at the isp's whining. They always whine. This increase in consumer speed will pace the build-up of the backbone which is continuall happening. Much of that "dark fiber" is being reclaimed, and will be put into use. More is being discussed.
Cisco just came out with routers that switch vastly more connections at much higher speeds than before, for this very eventuality.
By the time we see 150Mb/s in a good number of homes, the isp's will have far more bandwidth to allocate, as will individual sites. The same thing will be true when 1Gb/s comes out. Not to worry.
I heard the same complaints when broadband first came out, and the average site was running 1 to 3 1.54Mb/s lines, and the backbone was just 1Gb/s.
We're far past that now, with many sites having several Gb/s capacity, and the backbone is running at several Terab/s.
There will always be times when home capacity outstrips the isp for a short while, but then it catches up. Let them bitch. Those who refuse to upgrade will fail, which is as it should be.
Just? Old news. Toshiba's news conference was at 5 p.m. Tokyo time, 3 a.m. Eastern time. I posted about that early this morning. Do try to keep up.
By "just" I meant this morning. I'm sure it has been mentioned elsewhere, but it hadn't yet on this thread.
Actually wasn't the price higher because of the BD format? So it can still be said that BD was the reason it didn't sell well.
If you carefully read my post you would see what I wrote about that.
But, you're putting it backwards, saying that the format itself was to blame, when it wasn't, it was just the price, which was also a result of the expensive Cell inside.
Both have been dropping in price rapidly.
Try to understand that the DVD players in both the 360 and Wii cost the manufacturers about $5. That price won't drop anymore. No advantage there. The cpu for the Wii is cheap as well, just an upgraded PPC from the Cube.
The 360's 3 core PPC is more expensive, but less than the Cell, and the R&D costs were much less as well.
What this all means is that the PS3 price can continue to drop much more than the rivals, while making a profit.
In addition, given the time they've had to work on it, gaming companies have said that the tools provided have finally matured. They were pretty rough at launch, and that contributed to the game delays later on. but this is behind them, and more games are arriving.
We can see that the PS3 is outselling the 360, and both reasons account for that. As a game machine, and as a player.
As a Blu Ray player, yes. As a gaming machine, almost but not quite.
The better selection of games and XBox Live still makes the XBox 360 a better gaming console for any serious gamer. Many people own both, but those that pick one in the console gaming community still prefer an Xbox 360.
I've found it to be very interesting that for the past year, the anti-PS3 and Sony camp has alternately said that while the PS3 was a better player, it was an inferior game machine, then, despite it being a better game machine, it was an inferior player.
I've also read ad nausium that it sold because it was a player, but not as a console, and that it sold because it was a console, but not as a player.
I do wish people would make up their minds!
We will see, over the next year, that games for the PS3 will be out in numbers, and that as game companies get more used to the machines, the graphics and gameplay will be better than that of the 360, if even just by a little, at first.
As a player, I also find it interesting that home theater designers, and installers, according to the home theater magazines, much prefer BD, and in the form of the PS3.
I'm buying one as soon as the new player becomes available, so that I can decide which one to get. Meanwhile my friends have brought theirs over to try out. Games, even though they are first generation, still look spectacular.
I agree with both of those posts.
MS possibly made a fatal decision in not including HD-DVD as a built-in. They could have sucked up the extra losses. Hell, they lost $1.2 billion for the first five years on their games division since the first XBox came out, EVERY YEAR.
Also, the well publicized failures of the 360's is well known. The fix MS has supposedly incorporated has been doubted to actually fix the problem. This is costing MS a whopping $1.3 billion in announced losses just to take care of warrantee costs for that problem alone. Estimates is that it may be too low, as it assumes a 16.5% failure rate, where estimates of that failure rate are that it is at least 30%, and that eventually may include ALL 360' s out there.
Meanwhile, the PS3 is acknowledged to be rock stable.
It's over.
Toshiba just announced they are stopping manufacturing of HDDVD.
http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2008_02/pr1903.htm
.
Probably the only thing in your diatribe that has any validity.
The only thing that was more open was the lack of region codes. But, Bd has fewer than DVD currently has, and are not being used to this date. Even so, almost no one cares about that anyway.
I agree with both of those posts.
MS possibly made a fatal decision in not including HD-DVD as a built-in. They could have sucked up the extra losses. Hell, they lost $1.2 billion for the first five years on their games division since the first XBox came out, EVERY YEAR.
Also, the well publicized failures of the 360's is well known. The fix MS has supposedly incorporated has been doubted to actually fix the problem. This is costing MS a whopping $1.3 billion in announced losses just to take care of warrantee costs for that problem alone. Estimates is that it may be too low, as it assumes a 16.5% failure rate, where estimates of that failure rate are that it is at least 30%, and that eventually may include ALL 360' s out there.
Meanwhile, the PS3 is acknowledged to be rock stable.
Yeah, I agree. I think the balance of power in the 360 vs PS3 race just shifted. The end of the format war will definitely help out the PS3, though MS fanbois will be loath to admit it.
Microsoft, meanwhile, will scramble to get a Blu-ray add-on for the 360 out, and/or drop 360 pricing further. On the PS3 side, the console is finally due to get some really good games, and developers are finally starting figuring out how to program efficiently for it, meaning that the PS3's higher limits should start coming into play. I'd expect worldwide PS3 sales for 2008 to outpace the 360, though I'm sure MS will put up a heckuva fight.
Though, can anything knock off the Wii? It's so very well-positioned with that low price during a time of economic uncertainty. And mainstream gamers just flat-out love it.
.