They're right. Toward the EOL the PS3 had a big resurgence as THE console of South America and Southeast Asia due to highly available used games, console jailbreaks etc. and of course FIFA.
Isn't that kind of the ideal cycle though? From what I recall, consoles operate on the gilette model, ie the console is sold at a loss and games are the breadwinner.
In this case, better to reduce early sales which are sold at a loss (production being expensive, significant R&D, scale being low), maximise at the end of the life when i assume they are maximising profits per console due to scale and R&D already being covered.
Consoles haven't been sold at a loss for a long time. They're not the Gillette model at all, though a lot of people still think they are.
So, no -- it is never better to reduce early sales. You want to sell as many units as possible, as many games as possible, as many accessories as possible, as soon as possible.
(Also, as the same console does becomes cheaper to manufacture over the years, the price tends to go down as well.)
It's not double, it's 87.4 million units vs 86 million units. And he's right about multiplatform games. I can't think of any games that ran better on the PS3 than the 360, and a lot that ran better on the 360 than the PS3.
It's true the devs have become more comfortable develeoping games as the console matured but that's about it.
Xbox was always flop comparing to PS