The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story up outlining the challenges facing the Playstation 3 as we near the start of what will likely become one of the most heated consoles wars to date.

Besides the obvious, delays, costs, technological set-backs, Sony' s also facing a pretty major challenge from its once faithful third-party developers.

I think that Michihiro Sasaki, senior vice president of Square Enix, summarizes the issue best.

" We don' t want the PlayStation 3 to be the overwhelming loser, so we want to support them," says Michihiro Sasaki, senior vice president of Square Enix. " But we don' t want them to be the overwhelming winner either, so we can' t support them too much."

He goes on to say that while he' s planning on developing the " most advanced Final Fantasy game" for the PS3, they still haven' t decided which console will get Kingdom Hearts, once a Playstation mainstay.

It' s kind of fascinating to watch the game developers try to tinker with the console balance of power through strategic game release. I suspect, it could very easily blow up in their collective faces. I' ve always held that the more consoles there are out there the better off the entire industry is. In nosing around this topic, I get the sense from the big three console makers, that they feel the same way: None of them want to see the others fail so miserably they leave the fight, they want to be first out of three.

Brian Crecente