PS3 sells faster than Xbox 360 during 2007 in Australia

While the sales charts do in fact confirm that Australians have poor taste in games, that's hardly evidence to support the claim for brand domination, just that people have poor tastes. Like it or not Microsoft as far as gaming goes are viewed as unreliable, problematic, hazardous, imitation PC's, with the original X-BOX they shot themselves in the foot by the sheer number of exclusives ported to the PC who really didn't have much by way of heft system requirements. Sony, really entered the whole PC port "stuff might happen" this generation as opposed to last with all previous problems having been nutted out in the NTSC regions before PAL regions, so to those individuals Sony is a more reliable company all round (hardware and software).

We forget that these figures are also reflective of the Japanese market and MS' inability to break over there as well, surely you're not about claim that the Japanese also buy totally on brand names because they haven't got on board with the 360?

Australians for the most part I would think, would go with a company that hard the largest game base (the PS2) and the lesser problems in their own region, as opposed to a manufacturer who still haven't given a reliable console in 2 generations, continues to "pride" itself on FPS, Sport & Racing titles (which combats with the PC gamers) who, while they are better with conversions don't ship a complete console to some people (add on to do this, add on to do that, payment to use an online service a competitor gives for free) which may cause other people to wonder if MS actually do even care about the gaming aspect of their consoles.

Your point would be valid if MS was sticking with it's original revision of it's console, since then the games would be for that console and it may then be enough to sway people to stick with the 360. However, targeting a niche market with their main gaming genres, asking for more money once the console is purchased on a constant basis outside of gaming, and actually providing revisions to their console would bode against confidence in their product, because you only revise hardware for 2 reasons;

To increase it's potential
To fix up your previous screw ups

MS have proven to people that it was the latter, would you have confidence in MS if your stock console was basically outdated in months, and that version was then outdated again or would you get enough of it and simply think "Oh it's Microsoft, if the game sells well they'll port it anyway to screw them."

On top of that you have the "future possibilities" that people are banking on with Sony, you can't completely disregard the entire PS1 & PS2 library from peoples minds simply because right at this very moment "the 360 has more games than the PS3" people will be of the opinion that yes, while that is true, the previous generation showed that Sony still could blanket the market.

Anyway, I'm more surprised at the sales of the Wii, I would have thought that more people would have been worried about Nintendo really being the only ones to region encode their games and with some games keep with the half year - year long conversions, I would have though people would have thought a bit on where the buck would stop with their games, so if I had to claim any company was being bought on brand name alone it would probably be Nintendo.

Anyway, I rambled I still own neither of the 3 and plenty of grains of salt to give if you dis/agree with the statement on any basis.