IGN just posted a roundtable on Sony, “Is Sony in Trouble?”

They hash up all the usual complaints about the PS3 such as the price, the launch titles, and most of all, the price.

will you feel compelled to spend $600 for the PS3’s exclusive titles or about half that for the Wii’s entirely unique experience? I’ll of course buy all three, but it’s unlikely that “Middle America” will do the same.

They seem to have forgotten what may be the biggest contender for that market this holiday: the PS2. At $129 in the U.S., it is far cheaper than all the new consoles, even the Wii, it has a great library of cheap, recent, high quality, exclusive titles, and has a surprisingly strong list of upcoming titles. This holiday season, PS2 has four 100% exclusive titles that look absolutely amazing: Okami, Yakuza, Bully (the Xbox version was recently cancelled according to spong), and Guitar Hero 2. God of War 2 is also coming shortly afterwards in early 2007. None of the other consoles have that strong of an upcoming lineup of exclusives.

IGN also apparently misses that the announced prices are just launch prices aimed at the high end consumers when there is a huge initial pent up demand. Only afterwards, will they focus on the more casual “Middle America” (or Europe or Asia) market with lower pricing. They also omit that there is a fully capable $500 PS3 model which is the most closely spec’d to the $400 360 and that the 360 requires you to spend extra for a lot of functionality that people want which is already included in the base PS3 price such as online play and HD movie functionality.

If Sony can deliver on what they’ve announced, I think Sony will take the cake this holiday season and this console cycle.

Now what we really be interesting is if some guys from this site, ps3blog, got in on such a roundtable. Rather than listening to the IGN choir regurgitate the same tired doom and gloom over and over amongst themselves and then reading our standard rebuttals separately over here at ps3blog, why not mix the two camps together? Now THAT would be entertainment.

What do you guys think?

Is Sony in Trouble?