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Before I give my thoughts on the three press conferences that have been put on over the past day and a half I'll just remind the audience that I currently own a Sony PS3 and PSP and don't own any other gaming platforms, namely those produced by Microsoft or Nintendo. I've also based my impressions not on the conferences themselves -- that would take too long -- but Joystiq's very good liveblogging along with a little reading online afterwords. As for my thoughts on Nintendo and Microsoft, I'm generally neutral on Nintendo even though I'm as shocked as anyone else at their runaway success this generation and I'm generally hostile towards Microsoft mostly because of their long history of underhanded and anticompetitive activities in the PC space.

The Common Theme
Across all three conferences I noticed what I think is the operative theme: pleasing your established base. To be sure some feints were made into markets that aren't the primary one for each of the big three, but almost everything announced for each system caters to the crowd currently owning and using that console. Now if you're trying to steal gamers away from a console in the same space this isn't so bad, but if you're trying to grow your console's appeal this isn't how to do it.