Tales from the front

The war is on between Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft for supremacy over your video game budget. With all three consoles on the Dutch market for a month and a half now, it's time for some observations from the front:

• Sony is doing badly. You've got stacks and stack and stacks of big huge PlayStation3 boxes in every electronics store in the country. It's huge and it's heavy... and so is the price tag. Seriously, 600 euros!? I would have believed 400 euro. I don't pay 500+ euros for a DVD player/recorder, so why would I pay that money for a PS3? Seriously overpriced. And that's why the boxes are still there... or is that Sony's marketing strategy? Use electronic stores as your own personal advertisement boards?
  
• In contrast the Nintendo Wii is NOWHERE to be found. We are now about five months into the release and I have NEVER seen a stray Wii in the wild. As soon as somebody finds one, it's gone. The Wii is like urban myth. You hear about people who have one, but no one can tell you where to find another.
• And now Microsoft is getting egg on its face because of the Dutch consumer market. Apparently DVDs and game discs in the XBox 360 get scratched, even after a small amount of time. Microsoft has now been featured in at least two nationally televised consumer programmes, Kassa and Radar (coincidentally, both from our local communist station VARA). Microsoft might finally get some backlash, after a year of moderate success in the market.
  

Maybe I better skip this video game generation...