By any logical reason the PS2 should be in last place this console war. It came out a year after the Dreamcast and at it's launch - the line-up of PS2 games looked worse than the then current Dreamcast games. Most of the developers complained that the PS2 was hard to program for, and it had huge aliasing problems with jaggies showing up all over the screen. And frankly, the launch line-up sucked.

So why did it win, and why after so much time can they still sell it for so much? One Reason: Developers and Exclusives. The same reason that the Dreamcast failed - and why Nintendo (and Microsoft) are not way ahead.

If you want to play a whole bunch of games - especially RPG's and so-called "cool" exclusives (yes, they did come out over a year or two later on the Xbox, I know ...) mass games like GTA - you just *have* to have a PS2. It's the safest choice for the mass market because nearly every developer will make games for that system. Sony realized this from the beginning - that if you win the publishers and the developers, then you win the public. So while it has weak first party developers (compared to Nintendo, or even Microsoft) it has the strongest third party support.

Microsoft is using the same approach - buying into exclusives if it needs to (i.e. Bungie and Rare) and also paying big bucks to make sure that EA and others fully support it. In fact, one of the main reasons that Sega uses to explain the failure of the Dreamcast was that EA decided not to support it. You need the developers, and especially EA (even though I hate EA and don't play their games myself).

Nintendo doesn't believe in this approach. They build their consoles primarily to support their own first party games (they admit this in the design of the keypad and stuff and also they make decisions like choosing mini disks that hold a fraction of the data of the other consoles and neven dropping support of components like progressive scan or online adaptors in their consoles to cut costs (meanwhile Sony released their PStwo and actually made it cooler while adding stuff to it so that it could continue to sell at HIGHER price). Nintendo jut doesn't really focus that much on the third parties (at least not as much as Microsoft and Sony). So in the end, if you like Nintendo first party games, then you have to own a Nintendo system, and that's basically Nintendo's market.

The problem is that people that don't own a Nintendo console and that aren't familiar with Nintendo first party titles (let's face it - it's been a loooooong time since NES and Super Mario World when Nintendo was an undisputed number one) have no reason to buy it when the games that everybody is talking about aren't on that system.

But having said all of that - some developers - like Capcom with Resident Evil 4 still go out of their way to support the Cube with what may be the best title on the system (Matt on IGN said thait if it came out in 2004 it would have been his GOTY). If it doesn't sell a few million copies - while Fable can do that on the Xbox as the biggest disappointment of the year - what do *you* think developers will do?

If Resident Evil 4 does not sell through (and I mean BIG TIME) on the Gamecube - I think the repercussions will last through to the next generation as well. It may be a stretch to day this - but if RE 4 is not a blockbuster, then Nintendo may have lost the next round in the console fight before it even begins.