If you follow the console gaming industry, you'll likely get a kick out of this: Screen Play recently did an interview with Sony Computer Entertainment Australia CEO Michael Ephraim, and what he had to say...well, just read this snippet:

With its wide range of titles, PS2 has become the family favourite, but it's a mantle that will be seriously challenged by Nintendo's Wii. Do you think Wii can attract many new consumers who haven't previously owned a console before?

Nintendo is a great company as far as games development goes, they have been around for
a long time, they know how to deliver an entertaining product. My only question for this Christmas on Wii is the price point. Even though it's affordable, at $400 plus whatever you need to buy accessories-wise, I'm guessing you need to spend about $500 to take home a Wii and enjoy it. I can't judge the product because I haven't played it but I've heard good things about it. For this Christmas, I think that price point is still not family entertainment because $500 is a lot to fork out, but we welcome the Nintendo heritage of gaming where they can appeal to a broader audience because long-term that is critical for the industry. What we've done on PlayStation 2 with social gaming has broadened the audience and we're glad that they are attempting to do similar things to open up the market to families and never-before gamers. Time will tell. For this Christmas I think the price for what it specifically does as a video games machine is a bit pricey, but I think that their strategy long term we have great respect for.

And this one:

Do you expect 360 to do well among the more traditional gaming audience now that PlayStation 3 won't arrive until March?

If you look at what's happening in retail, 360 has done fairly well at launch but since then it has struggled to kick up a gear to the next level of sales. I think their product offering is still not broad enough. The content is narrow and appeals only to a very core group. I don't see content that will appeal to a family or a broader mass-market audience. It's still pricey, and I'm sure Microsoft will do everything they can, but if you just look at the offerings from each format and the marketplace that we are now playing in, especially PlayStation 2, it has to be affordable because we are talking about mass-market and non traditional gamers. We clearly have that advantage going into this Christmas. Microsoft's price point at $600-plus a big investment for family entertainment.

Now, keeping in mind that we're talking Australian dollars (which, as far as I know, is worth even less than the Canadian loonie right now), isn't this kind of contradictory, especially considering the fact that the premium PS3 package costs $100 more than the 360's premium package and doubles the cost of the Wii? Also, the last time I checked the prices of the next-gen titles, 360 games were still $60 while most of the PS3's games whose prices I saw were $75. Granted, these are tentative prices, but $75 for a game? It's like the Nintendo 64 all over again (remember buying $100 carts?). And even if he's comparing the 360 and Wii to the PS2, why compare next-gen consoles with a six-year-old console that will be obsolete within a month's time?

To conclude, Sony is dumb, which is all I really wanted to say. But my obsession with proving my point in a detailed fashion defeats me once again. :(