• Financial Times, Monday, June 1, 2009 11:15 AM

Sony and Microsoft sense an opportunity to make some headway against the runaway success of Nintendo's Wii, Chris Nuttall reports. Both will be launching products at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles this week even as Nintendo's sales are starting to slack off.

Microsoft is expected to announce today a new motion-sensing game controller that has more sophisticated capabilities than the one that has driven the success of Wii. And Sony on Tuesday will unveil a new version of its PlayStation Portable -- the PSP Go -- that will compete with the Nintendo DS handheld console and does not require an optical disc drive.

Rivals perceive weakness in Nintendo's reluctance to cut the price of the $250 Wii, in its limited number of titles for hard-core gamers and in its lack of features such as hard-drive storage and high-definition video. "It's one thing to be able to sell a console based on party games, but how does that stack up to an ongoing commitment to buy software titles or the next generation of the console?" asks Forrester Research analyst Paul Jackson.

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